Adrienne Young-Cooper lives in Auckland where she is a director of Hill Young-Cooper Ltd, a resource management and local government consultancy. Adrienne is also a director of Solid Energy New Zealand and Maritime New Zealand, and she serves on the board of Housing New Zealand.

My first major role in governance came as a volunteer when I was 21. I was working as a counsellor for Youthline in Christchurch. They had an excellent training programme for young people who wanted to be involved and I ended up taking on more and more responsibility and eventually ended up as the chair. I also got involved with the local branch of the New Zealand Planning Institute and rose to the role of chair there as well. It doesn't take much to get yourself involved at that level – I simply put my hand up and I found myself the secretary, treasurer or chair of the organisation.

I learned a lot from those community boards. They exposed me to stewardship and taught me to deal with conflict, manage different types of people and handle the pressures of delivering services on limited budgets. Some even expose you to good reporting good bookkeeping practices. That exposure gradually built me up and enabled me to step up to more important roles.

I had a rapid rise through the management levels in local government and by the time I was 40 I was managing a large staff and a multi-million dollar budget. But I wanted to do more, so it was at that stage that I made a conscious decision to get involved in governance.

You can learn a hell of a lot by starting in community organisations, but being a member of a board of a community organisation does not automatically qualify you to be a director of a larger organisation. Naively, I thought that if I joined the Institute of Directors I would suddenly start to get offered directorships, but it simply doesn't work like that, as I was to find out.

I'm the type of person who thought that if I write a good CV, work hard and submit strong applications then I would automatically be successful. So I joined the Institute of Directors and did its five-day company directors programme. I went to countless breakfasts, met lots of different people and I went to all the Institute's ongoing training courses. I even went to the University of Auckland Business School to do further training in things like finance for non-financial people and future planning for business. I was basically just filling up my CV.

After a couple of years it dawned on me that I really had no idea how to become a director. I realised that trying hard didn't really seem to be the way that it happened and if there was a process to go through, it was quite opaque to me. I found that very disheartening and I essentially gave up on the idea when, out of the blue, my first governance role emerged. All the hard work had paid off, but I now know that there isn't really one guaranteed pathway to get on your first board. It just takes time.

I also know that boards are selective, and with good reason. Being a director is a very important and responsible position, one I see as looking after a business or organisation for someone else – either shareholders, or in the case of a council, the residents and ratepayers of the area. Either way, it's a role where you must exercise a great deal of judgement and stewardship. At the top of an organisation I get to see many of the challenges and I've learned a great deal about management and accountability. Making the decisions that decide the future of an organisation is something that gives me a great deal of enjoyment and a sense of personal satisfaction.