Transcript of Your Best Next Move: How to Approach Mentors and Sponsors to Grow Your Career
Hi everyone, Bobbie LaPorte here with my weekly tip for Your Best Next Move where I help you have more agency in your work, acknowledge your capacity to act, and see what you can do right now.
So, two things about today’s tip. It’s gonna be audio-only and it’s going to be short. And the reason for that is that I have a little Boo Boo incident over the weekend. I tripped and fell going up some stairs. Brick stairs, of course. Nothing soft right stuff? Got a couple of nice little gashes on the side of my face and I don’t want you to be distracted by what I have to say so this is going to be audio-only and hopefully I will see you next week.
I just wanted to talk really briefly today about the relational resources that you need to be successful in your career. In these tips before I’ve talked about mentors and sponsors, I’ve talked about increasing your connection with your peers. I wanted to talk just because of two examples I had this week about how you can find people, key people, significant people, either inside your company or outside your company to help you advance your career.
But I know many of you are saying, “I don’t have time to do that.”
Number one, you have to find the time.
Number two, you may say, “they don’t really know me. And why would they take my call? Or why would they be willing to meet with me?”
That second part is really important because anybody who’s been successful has had help. They’re there because other people have gone out on a limb for them, have supported them in different ways, so I think it’s really important that you consider people, again either inside or outside your organization who can help you. Either sponsors in your company or somebody outside who can help you advance a particular key initiative, or project.
The important thing is that you need to understand that we all have currency. We all have value in this process. We all have something to offer, Now I don’t care who you’re reaching out to and where you are in the organization.
So let me share two examples. I’m working with a group of high potential emerging leaders at Adobe and we had a session on mentors and sponsors, and how do you engage people, senior people in the organization to be receptive of your request to be their mentor, their sponsor?
Working with a couple of women in the program, we were able to really define clearly what their value was in the organization. Why they would benefit from having the guidance and the attention of this person, and importantly what was in it for this person.
That’s the part of, not that there always has to be a quid pro quo or any kind of special reciprocity, but I really think it’s important we all realize we have value and so that we have… and we should sit up high and reach out to people and say, “look, I have something to offer as well, I would love to have your support. Here’s what I could offer you.”
For these people that I was working with, it ended up being very positive, and they’re able to get good reception to their requests. But they really spend some time thinking about, why this person and what was in it for them?
And the second request is more personal one. I reached out earlier this week to a very famous author and asked him if he would endorse my book that’s coming up. And I had no expectation that he was going to say yes, but I spent time obviously researching him and very specifically told him why I was selecting him because I only pick three or four people to do outreach to. And he wrote right back to me and said, congratulations, you know, I’d be happy to take a look at it. Let me know your deadline.
Here’s My Tip:
- You need people in senior significant positions either inside or outside of your company to support you.
- You need to make the time and have the intention to reach out to them.
- Three and most importantly you need to understand and we all have this what your value is. What is the particular currency you have to offer. How can you help them.
You know, we’re in this organizational period where the problems we’re dealing with are so complex nobody has the answer. The playing field I’m seeing is becoming much more level and people at various levels of organization are needing to connect and to reach out to each other and to tap into each other’s strengths.
So, consider that when you want to make requests to somebody who you might be a little leery of contacting, but you think would really help you in your career.
Alright, that’s my tip. I hope you have a great week. Thank you for listening and hopefully I will see you next week. Take care bye bye.
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