Do you feel stuck on the career ladder? You are ambitious. You want your career to move on and up. You want fulfilment and challenge in your work. You want your existing skills acknowledged and rewarded. You also want to enhance and expand them by being given new opportunities and promotions. Yet it is not happening.
So what do you do? Focusing on your soft skills will make all the difference.
Mentoring is about YOU prioritising YOU. It is a gift you give to yourself, an opportunity to stop and take time for yourself and enhance your professional leadership development. It is a time to reflect and think about what you are doing and why you are doing it, with a guide on the side in your mentor. It takes you outside the day-to-day challenges and with the help of your mentor, you can look at them differently. You will sleep at night, confident in your ability to lead your organisation inspiring and motivating your people.
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My stress was rolling uncontrollably down a steep hill. It felt like I had no control of it. I was on the airport bus on my way to catch a plane to Adelaide. I had just reached into my bag to get my mobile phone and it wasn’t there. It had to be there, so I emptied everything out on the seat…. but it wasn’t there!
I had no addresses of where I had to go. No exact address of where I was staying. No phone numbers of anyone I was to meet. No Uber app. No plane bookings or reference numbers. All were on my phone.
It took me at least 15 minutes to regain equilibrium and then I spent the next hour on the bus planning my strategy for when I reached the airport. My proactive, solution-focused, emotionally intelligent, and resilient self came to the fore.
So what did I do and what did I learn?
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Are you one of the many people who feel overwhelmed and overloaded at present? Are you at burnout stage? Do you feel bombarded from all sides? Is your mental health being affected by this pressure and stress? Are you also one of the people who are being ordered back into the workplace where you know the stress levels you now feel will be escalated?
Why is this happening? Is it your manager putting you under this pressure? Is it the culture of the organisation in which you work? Is it your expectations?
Could it be that you aren’t managing your time constructively? Are you spending your time putting out bushfires, being challenged by the pounding surf or mending fences, all unfulfilling work that is urgent but not important? What would happen, how would you feel if you could do work that was important, where you were able to put first things first and saw you making a real difference?
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So many people are stuck, overwhelmed with regret about what they didn’t do or should have done, unable to let go of what they perceive as failure. Failure is never an ending. It is an opportunity to learn and those who proactively do the reflection also learn. They start again, and, as C S Lewis says, they change the ending.
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Moving from team member Friday to team leader Monday is challenging. Within 6 weeks of her promotion Jane had a problem that was causing her great anxiety. A close friendin the team, Emma, was coming in late to work and leaving early. Team members were complaining to Jane about it because they felt she was not addressing it because Emma was her friend. Jane who had been a long time mentee of mine came back to mentoring for help in managing the situation. How was she, as team leader, going to address this behaviour with Emma without damaging their personal relationship. Jane wanted a win/win outcome. She expected the mentoring to be quite straight forward, given her previous work with me. As result of the mentoring the outcomes was quite unexpected, much more successful that Jane ever imagined or thought possible. It was certainly a win/win outcome.
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In spite of billions of dollars being spent by organisations on leadership development programs globally, 75% have found their programs ineffective. Add to that the 70,000 books and videos on leadership development, and leaders are still left with big gaps in skill development. With some programs and courses costing a fee of anything from $50,000 – $150,000, organisations are realising a poor return on their investment.
The reasons for the failure of so many leadership development programs are varied, but the key criticisms are that the programs are too theoretical and academic, not addressing in a practical way the real issues that leaders are facing. There is no follow up within the organisation afterwards, and no support to implement what was taught and learned. Gallup’s research had shown that 87% of the skills learned in a single workshop are lost within a month and participants revert to the way they did things before. Knowing this was a strong reason for me to shift to focusing all my leadership development work on mentoring post COVID.
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Could it be this easy – that emotional bank accounts enhance employee engagement? Wouldn’t we all do it? Well it can be that easy with a lot of commitment from those at the top. But it requires a change in mindsets and behaviours, but the results are significant. The level of disengagement globally is very high. According to highly regarded Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace Report 2022, employee engagement in Australia and New Zealand is 19%.
Research after research project has shown the importance of employee engagement on all aspects of business success. There are already some organisations that have already discovered this. These are the businesses that the same report above has shown have 23% higher profits due to their high employee engagement. The impact that lack of engagement has also significantly impacts productivity with some suggesting that it costs businesses up to 42% year.
The research revealed that most employees do not feel valued and appreciated at work by their managers or their organisations. Is this why so many are disengaged? If this why so many organisations are unproductive?
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Why are some people more successful than others with seemingly the same opportunities? Because they make commitments, not just decisions. In this blog post you will discover the difference. We make these decisions with the very best of intentions, and we actually take action on them. But, after a few weeks we let all kinds of other things get in the way and we abandon the achievement of everything we decided to do.
Decisions are nothing more than ideas in our heads unless we follow through on them. Commitment is the Energy that fuels our action.
The challenge this week is to take time out to clarify what you want to make a commitment to in your professional and personal life that will make a significant difference. Commitment requires time, energy and even a financial investment so your commitment needs to be important to you. Take action now to begin to change your life
This is a follow up to my post earlier about Your Network is Your Networth. This is to inspire you as to what is possible if you take that seriously and build your net-worth through networking.
I am attaching two articles on SuperConnectors. These are the people who have taken networking to a new level. Many people network with a sole purpose of serving themselves – getting business, status, ego development in knowing the right people, for example. Because we all know people like that, we are then hesitant to do what I have suggested you do in my previous blog post and reach out to those with whom you want to connect. We are frightened of being rejected because we don’t see ourselves in their league. This is what is different about the SuperConnectors, they bring a generosity to their networking. They are about helping others, sharing their net-worth with those they meet, interact and connect with.
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