Is Your Career on Track? Part 2 : Assessing your Relationships and Career Support Team

In Part 1 of this series, we looked at aspects of self-awareness as a way to assess your career now and in the future. It’s always important to gauge your true feelings about the state of your career and how it is or is not working for you.

Your self-awareness is a critical part of this assessment, but your relationships with others are equally important.

Even as a solopreneur, relationships are key to my own success. They become much more so in a company/corporation. Having the right relationships, working on these relationships, and growing them can also grow your career.

It really does take a village to bring together a successful career. Think about the village of your situation right now. Who are the critical players? What exposure do you have to them? Are your relationships working in the way that’s best for you and your career?

If you regularly miss outings and other opportunities to be with peers and leaders outside of the office, you may be missing an opportunity in your career.

Here are a few things to consider in cultivating the right relationships in your career:

How’s your relationship with your boss and with their peers? It’s always important to have a great relationship with your boss, but it’s equally important to have visibility within your boss’s peer group. These are the leaders who will be in the room discussing your career. So many times as a senior leader, I would present candidates for promotion only to hear my peers say, “But I don’t even know who that is.” Assess your visibility in the organization. Cultivate your relationship with your boss. If you have a difficult relationship, consider moving or find out what you need to do to manage your boss effectively.

Do you have the right people/team around you?

Sounds cliché but the right people really do make all the difference. Is your team a cooperative one? Do you have a supportive boss or support from upper management? Do you feel a part of the team or an outsider? How well do you know your co-workers? What steps do you take to network with peers on a regular basis? You are all working toward the same goals. It helps to have a great relationship with these individuals.

Who are your supporters/mentors/sponsors? List them out. How often do you meet with them? Don’t have mentors or sponsors? Now is the time to work to cultivate these important relationships. Many leaders consider it an honor to mentor others (at one time, I mentored 25 individuals as a leader). Sponsors are developed over time. Please see my article on Sponsorship for more information.

How’s the stability of the department/company? Is it time to look at options? Although this is not a relationship factor, per se, this is more about being aware of what is going on around you. Is the company stable? Have there been rumors of growth or rumors of downsizing? Is there a lot of business transformation going on around you? A key indicator of change is when a company is either growing or losing market share. This is why it’s important to be aware of key company trends. If things are going in the wrong direction, what options do you want to look at now?

Understanding your self and your relationships are important to ensure your career is on track. In Part 3 of this series, I’ll discuss how networking impacts your relationships and your career.

ACTION CHALLENGE

What relationships stood out for you as important to cultivate?  List these and prioritize.  In listing them, what actions are you ready to take to build and strengthen these important individuals in your career.

 

 

Up Coaching LLC.

Lupe S. Wood, MS, PCC, is a certified Career/Executive Coach. She coaches individuals and leaders to career fulfillment, transition, and advancement. She also consults for results with businesses and solopreneurs. Her background includes 12 years in senior leadership for a Fortune 100 corporation and 7 years as a coach, with a Master’s degree in Organizational Effectiveness and Executive Coaching.

 

For more information, please visit my website at www.upcoached.com

 

 

How to Get More Done Every Day by Doing Less

Time management is always important, but even more so in this time of COVID 19.

The virus is all about disruption, and sometimes we forget that could also apply to our daily routines.

How long has it been now? It seems as though we have been in the pandemic quarantine for months, yet I can trace back to March 13th, 2020 as being the date when it officially started for me. That’s 4 weeks ago from today, as I write.

Time almost literally stopped. I found myself in the midst of the tsunami, having to hurriedly prepare for life under quarantine, and that became a problem for all of my regular work that still needed to get done.

As I finally caught up on email and daily to-do lists recently, I realized that they all stopped on that fateful Friday the 13th. It seems I’ve been a bit distracted since then, as have we all.

When the brain is in survival mode, it’s difficult to concentrate on anything else.

I had to re-invent how I tackle my daily/weekly/monthly to-do list. I set about to experiment with some different approaches. I actually made a game of it, trying different techniques every day.

  1. Set aside time on the calendar for strategic work
  2. Hold myself accountable with a partner
  3. Change how I listed items
  4. Tackle lower priority items at night after office hours

I was trying to find a new way to get it all done when an old way came to mind.

I love the story from 1918 (ironically, the time of the last major pandemic in the world). Charles Schwab was the president of Bethlehem Steel. He was in search of better ways to get more done for himself and his team, and so he hired a management consultant named Ivy Lee.

Lee had a method for time management. He was so convinced that this method would work, that he told Charles Schwab to try it for 3 months, and then send him a check for whatever he thought the method was worth. So, Schwab and his executive staff tried it for 3 months. At the end of the time, Schwab wrote Ivy Lee a check for $25,000 (over $400,000 now).

The method is simple yet powerful. In my “corona confusion,” I remembered it and tried it out again:

  1. At the end of each workday, write down the six most important things you need to accomplish tomorrow. Do not write down more than six tasks.
  2. Prioritize those six items in order of their true importance.
  3. When you start the next day, concentrate only on the first task. Work until the first task is finished before moving on to the second task.
  4. Approach the rest of your list in the same fashion. At the end of the day, move any unfinished items to a new list of six tasks for the following day.
  5. Repeat this process every workday.

I can tell you this works! I think the basic premise of why is that it is so simple! It also forces you to focus on what is most important – your priorities for the day, one at a time. It helps you to ruthlessly prioritize the most important work. I’ve found that the things that didn’t make the priority may not have had to get done anyway. It also keeps you from multitasking which studies have shown is much less effective than a single focus.

Is it time to reinvent your daily work and priorities?

Please remember to be kind to yourself and others. You’ve been through a lot. We all have. Maybe there really are some things that don’t need to get done during this time.

ACTION CHALLENGE

Please try the Ivy Lee method above and see if it may bring more productivity to your day. Also, I am still offering a free coaching session to all of you through April, to talk about the impact of the pandemic, or anything else on your mind. Please schedule here https://calendly.com/upcoached/60min.

 

Up Coaching LLC.

Lupe S. Wood, MS, PCC, is a certified Career/Executive Coach. She coaches individuals and leaders to career fulfillment, transition, and advancement. She also consults for results with businesses and solopreneurs. Her background includes 12 years in senior leadership for a Fortune 100 corporation and 7 years as a coach, with a Master’s degree in Organizational Effectiveness and Executive Coaching.

 

For more information, please visit my website at www.upcoached.com