Resuming Speed through Self Mentoring

If you have ever been stuck in a traffic jam, especially with a specific destination and timeframe in mind, you are probably familiar with the sense of frustration when you are ready to keep moving, but endlessly waiting for something to happen somewhere down the road.  A loss of forward movement can also occur in our personal and professional lives and invoke a similar response. When we expend energy every day just to maintain what appears to be the status quo – what we once thought to be an opportunity to build a rewarding career has now become monotonous dead-end job. For women in particular, this can be compounded by the daily struggle to break the glass ceiling.

Somewhere in the process, we may believe that having a mentor would solve this problem, as they can be a sounding board, a direct line to high-visibility projects and ultimately, a move up the ladder within an organization. While this type of mentoring may provide many benefits from a career standpoint, a recent posting from Lee Ann Mallorie, founder of Leading in Motion, offers an alternative – self mentoring – as a means of understanding our goals, drivers and strengths from the inside out. As a result, we can create a personalized path to our vision of success. Suggestions such as taking stock of activities that we truly enjoy, coming to better understand and control stressors in our lives and even consulting with a career coach are some ways to help us to begin moving again. Also compelling is the realization that a mentor’s guidance may reflect the path that was best in their own journey, but may not be as effective for someone with different strengths, priorities and passions.

By stepping back, and being confident in our abilities and better understanding our goals, we can gain clarity to begin to actively move toward our individual destination. Ultimately, Ms. Mallorie’s advice, along with proactivity and determination can enable us to develop into a highly-personalized plan which can be applied both inside the office and also in our personal lives.

Submitted by: Andrea Vargo

Serving on a board of directors is a professional goal for many WIN members. A key piece of advice expert panelists* shared at WIN’s March event struck me as deceptively simple: Determine your skill set—what you bring to the table—and then seek out committees that suit your strengths.

Boards, and the committees that serve under them, need a range of skills to function well. With so much information available online, finding out what an organization needs is easier than ever.

The harder thing for many of us is to determine where our strengths match those needs. Each of us has a unique combination of talents and abilities we bring to the table. But we often don’t think of them in relation to service on a board of directors.

For example, someone with a knack for connecting people with resources could be a great addition to a fundraising committee, while someone who can immediately find the pattern—or the aberration—in a data set could be perfect for an audit committee.

You may have just the skill a board on which you want to serve needs. Reframing your thinking from “How can I get onto a board of directors?” to “What can I offer a board that they need but don’t already have?” can help you get the seat at the table you want.

Have you reframed your thinking since the March event? If so, how?

* The experts on the panel were Ric Andersen, Partner, Peak Equity; Patricia Connolly, Executive Director, Center for Corporate Governance, Drexel University LeBow School of Business; Ellen Harvey, CFA, Managing Director, Miller Investment Management; Jeremy Tennebaum, CFO, Altman Foundation; Nancy Wolcott, Retired Financial Services Director; and Christine James, Managing Director, Wells Fargo Asset Management