Directors Confront Overscheduling Long Before Overboarding

For Dale Jones, it was a creeping realization that settled in over time. Two outside board seats, plus serving as a newly minted CEO, was just too much.

“I was looking at the calendar and trying to fit it all in and I realized that I didn’t have enough margin to make it all work,” says Jones, CEO of Diversified Search. “In these situations, you realize that you could be better at what you’re doing if you gave more time to a few things, as opposed to more time to a lot of things.”

As the requirements of being a CEO, serving on his company’s global operating committee, attending partners’ meetings, serving on two outside boards and having a family sunk in, it became clear that meeting all the demands was unsustainable. It wasn’t just fitting meetings and travel into his schedule that was untenable, Jones says, but the prep time required to contribute at a high level at all the appointments in his calendar.