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How to Find a Business Mentor Who'll Help You Achieve Your Leadership Goals


I often get asked for advice on how to find a mentor. This guest post by Rene D. Petrin provides a nice 8-step approach:

Back in December, Dan talked about "10 Big Development Goals for Leaders in 2012." Goal #7 in the blog post stated: “Find a mentor and/or hire a coach.” While a formal mentoring relationship – meaning one that takes place in a monitored program within an organization – is the ideal, sometimes an informal mentoring relationship is what’s available. The question is how do you go about making it happen?

Here are eight steps to follow:

Step #1: Identify one or two specific leadership skills you feel that you could improve through mentoring. Is it your ability to make strategic decisions in a quick and decisive manner? Is it your ability to recognize and develop talent to improve the success of your department and yourself? Something else?

Step #2: Now assess what style of leadership is best suited to you. (As you know, not everyone leads in the same way.) Are you more collaborative as a leader, working through consensus? Or are you a decisive type of leader who makes the decisions and motivates others to follow those decisions?

Step #3: ...
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Employee Engagement Task Force Update: Nita Clarke Video

Recognize This! – Employee engagement most certainly is not something else you must do. It must be primary focus to gain greatest competitive advantage and success in the marketplace.

I’m quite impressed by the level of commitment in Britain to employee engagement, first demonstrated in the very comprehensive MacLeod Employee Engagement Report of 2009, written by David MacLeod and Nita Clarke. Then last Spring, an Employee Engagement Task Force was created to bring together HR practitioners with others concerned about how to best engage employees and encourage them to give of their best every day.

Just yesterday, Nita Clarke conducted a video interview with People Management magazine. (I cannot embed the video for you, but it is available here.)

A couple of excerpts were particularly poignant. First, this statement showing engagement continues to rise up the management agenda because more and more leaders and managers now understand that old models of management are no longer sufficient to get the best work out of employees.

[1:46 time stamp] How has the employee engagement agenda moved on since the report from yourself and David MacLeod came out in 2009?

Salience of issue ...

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Friday hodgepodge

Issue #1: The EBINC.com website has reported that there are new guidelines for drug testing in the workplace. EBI reports that the changes are:

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) recently announced that the agency has accepted the recommendations of the Drug Testing Advisory Board (DTAB) to revise the DHHS Mandatory Guidelines for Federal Workplace Drug Testing Programs in the following two areas: 

  1. Expand the drug testing panel to include additional Schedule II prescription medications (e.g. hydrocodone, hydromorphone, oxycodone, and oxymorphone)  prescription painkiller opioid drugs, and;
  2. Include oral fluid as an alternative specimen for Federal Drug Free Workplace Programs (DFWP) testing. 

This is certainly great news to help support workplace drug testing programs as it provides more tools for employers to detect drugs of abuse. The Department of Transportation (DOT) will now be tasked with making a rulemaking change to finalize this rollout.  Understand that there will be continued deliberation, debate and also comment before these changes are put into place.  It could take several months before this ...

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What Makes a Good Retirement Plan? [infographic]

It's top-of-mind for almost everyone in the workforce—how can I save enough money to retire?

Businesses in different countries have different obligations to assist their employees with retirement savings. In many places, employers contribute to government-mandated pension plans. In others, retirement savings plans are lucrative benefits that employees appreciate dearly.

Do your employees even need a retirement plan? How strong is the government support? This infographic from Mercer investigates.

rating retirement systems infographic what makes for a good plan

 

How do you find out what your employees want? You ask them in a safe environment. TribeHR lets you solicit anonymous feedback from your team. Get started today. 

 


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Zappos’ Culture Isn’t for Everyone

Recognize This! -  The corporate culture appropriate for your organization is unique to you.

I write regularly about company culture, the importance of getting your culture right for your organization, and how strategic recognition is a powerful method for achieving that culture. But let’s be clear on two critical points:

1)   Your culture is unique to your organziation.

Zappos has a terrific, powerful culture. So does Southwest Airlines as well as many other companies. But that doesn’t mean that Zappos’ approach will work for you. A member of my team did a Zappos culture tour and enjoyed it immensely. We won’t be adopting a Zappos culture at Globoforce, however. We did learn several lessons and had many of our own beliefs firmly reinforced in that tour, though. And that’s the value of evaluating other strong cultures. Learn what you can; apply what makes sense. But you must create your own culture that works for your own organization.

2)  Culture is not a ping-pong table in the break room or pizzas every Friday.

A powerful article in Fast Company made this point:

“Culture, like brand, is misunderstood and often discounted as a touchy-feely component of business that ...

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Meta-mobile

As a followup to my last post, I was thinking how you would use the different modes of mobile (the Four C’s): Content, Compute, Communicate, & Capture, to support the different layers of learning.

Performance Support-Learning-Meta-Learning by Content/Compute/Communicate/CaptureHere I’ve made a first attempt at trying to matrix the 3 layers of learning (performance, learning, meta-learning) by the 4 C’s of mobile.  It’s indicative, not exhaustive, but it helps me to try to get concrete about what you might do.

As you can see, there’s some overlap, and one questions is are there continuums between the layers. Is performance support categorically different than formal learning, or are their bridges?  Is meta-learning categorically different?  (I’m not sure I care too much, as long as I’m considering all!)

So, in the interest of learning and thinking ‘out loud’, I invite your feedback.


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Recommended: Never Say Never

This year marks the 10 year anniversary of my start in consulting.  I’ve been reminiscing lately about when I started.  I remember getting one of two reactions when I first told people I was becoming a consultant:

First was the “look” that silently said “oh, you mean you’re going to consult until a great job comes along”. For those people, I found it took about a year for them to realize that consulting was my profession.  Not a part-time hobby.

The other was “oh, it must be great to never work for a company again.”

My answer for the second one was (and still is)…never say never.  I’ve always said if someone offers my dream job, I just might take it.  Now, that hasn’t happened and it’s not the point.  It’s keeping our minds open to new  ideas and professional, development, consulting, social media, strategic thinkingopportunities.

For example, I know several people looking for new jobs right now who have a long list of demands – no relocation, no excess travel, no staying late, no working on holidays, no cuts in pay or benefits…and the list goes on.  When I listen to them, it reminds me that some of the best professional experiences I’ve ever had came as a result of me not saying I’d “never” do something.

Same thing with social media.  I’ve ...

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The Quest for Excellence: It’s Why Learning Never, Ever Ends


“I will be glad when this is all over. I will never have to study anything anymore.”
That was a statement from my daughter during finals week in her senior year of college at Penn State. She sounded worn out. As I listened on the other end of the phone, I looked at my watch and realized it was too late to respond to that. I knew she was not in the mood to be receptive
Last week, I was in Pittsburgh leading two seminars for the Human Capital Institute (I am a faculty member). As I spoke, I kept emphasizing the need for constant learning

As I thought of that statement I realized the model for professional learning and development has changed tremendously. There once was a time when I would choose to attend a couple of learning events per year. When I returned from them, the vast majority of the time the courseware would eventually end up in the credenza in my office.
Does your learning become credenzaware?
I even coined a phrase called credenzaware. As I looked at the credenza in my office, I could literally track the learning events over the years. Each title brought back memories and some of the key points about the event. Some of the titles were ...
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The Management Model You Can’t Manage Without – Part 2

“Brain science’s transformation of management isn’t just about another new technique or model. It’s about shifting our paradigm to incorporate the hard data of science and fundamentally changing the way we think about business.”

                                  Charles S. Jacobs, Management Rewired

Neuroscience will revolutionize the way we do business. It will do that because it will eventually transform the way we view the way human beings function.  

In Part 1, we explored some of the fundamental principles that underlay contemporary management practices. It is safe to say that while issues like motivation, learning and “performance” are all topics that dominant management theory, they are not well understood within the context of human psychology.  

The dominant left-brain functioning which underpins management concepts keeps us stuck in old practices based on ideas of fragmented human experience.

The good but challenging news from the neuroscience front asserts that fragmentation isn’t really possible without a significant cost to well-being. Unless we view the person as a whole system we’re missing the amazing dynamism of human functioning and the ...

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Big Data Analytics a Key Enabler for Social CRM – Airlines Case Study

Big Data Analytics is a hot topic of discussion these days. But many feel that it is more of a “hype” and less of substance. In my opinion, Big Data Analytics is the real deal and if used correctly, can deliver great business results at a fraction of cost compared to other alternatives.

Here’s a simple yet very effective example of using analytics for understanding consumer attitudes towards airlines in real time. In this study, Jeffrey Breen has used the R programming language to analyze consumer sentiments about major U.S. airlines expressed on Twitter. For more on the methodology and results, see the following embedded Slideshare presentation (if you cannot see the embedded file, click here to view it on Slideshare website).

As you can see on slide no. 27, the twitter sentiment scores obtained  for many of the airlines are “comparable” to results of The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). What is important to note here is that by analyzing few tweets using freely available R programming language (which is part of the GNU project), it is possible to achieve results similar to that of an elaborate and expensive market research study such as ACSI at a fraction of a ...

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