Category Archives: Mentoring

So You Want To Be An IT Leader?

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If you’re an experienced IT ‘Subject-Matter-Expert’ now interested in adding a management/leadership role to your professional skillset, CIO Simon Stapleton has written a useful 24 page e-book on:

“The Essence Of IT Leadership Vol 1“.

IT-Leadership-Simon-Stapleton

I downloaded and read it in about 30 minutes and here are some comments on what I’ve learned, written from a (self) career coaching perspective.

The most important lesson from Simon’s writings is, like all good resources, you can enjoy reading it and yet nothing much will change for you without testing out at least one nugget of wisdom into your own life/career situation.

As an example, some of you may have read Steven Covey’s bestseller, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”. I know I did, some years ago. Several times.
OK. Now go ahead and write down those seven habits from memory… :-)

Continue reading →

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Are Time Management Weeds Overrunning Your Career Path? (GroundLog Day)

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One of the limiting aspects to my time management strategy has been a tendency to “over plan” goals and their related tasks – what I’d probably call an over indulgence in “self micro-management”, now that the jargon-creating neurons have lit up ;-)

By that I mean I’m one of those people who love planning around the status quo. Give me a steady state (life, career, health… you name it) and I can come up with 50 ways to tag, filter, refine and tweak whatever is apparently contributing to observed reality. A self-development Kafka-inspired bureaucrat, haha!

Viewed in a kinder light here’s someone who likes to be on the plateau for a while before climbing to the next level – however, the new scenery does tend to be dramatically different each time I do this e.g. leaving teaching, moving to Japan, leaving a good paying employee role for the challenges of entrepreneurship.

One of the most liberating activities you can do is to observe and describe how you are preserving the current status quo of your life. This is not a judgmental exercise in and of itself – you simply pay attention to how your time and efforts are passing for a week or more in one specific area of your life (this can obviously include career-related time and space).

You can see what you’ve been up to for the past week, month or longer by examining data from the following example sources (there will be others relevant to you):

1- Your business diary, personal journal or Personal Information Manager (I currently use InfoSelect8 on a PC).

2- Your Email sent box(es) and social media experiences (LinkedIn, FaceBook etc) – the who and what of your  digital communications.

3- Your Desktop layout (in-tray, filing system and workflow processing) for office and home, where applicable.

4- How much money you’ve spent on yourself and why.

5- Where you’ve been, what you’ve done and who you’ve met.

Instead of just a one-off event, what about making this approach even more effective by choosing a monthly “Ground Log Day, GLD” (in honour of that Bill Murray movie, Groundhog Day) where you spend about an hour sifting through the data at your leisure and flagging how much any of this is contributing to your desired career and life path.

Time management systems can be great in and of themselves but my experience has been that they’re optimally designed for handling activities and relationships that preserve the present flowing from the past.

By literally taking the time to flow back to the future (another great movie!) you will be encouraging that part of you which is invested in your career path to make it’s voice heard.

My next personal GLD is scheduled for Tuesday 11 November, Japan time. ( Subsequent months will be on 12 Dec, 1 Jan, 2 Feb, 3 Mar and so on… these are ‘ideal’ dates and not 100% fixed in concrete as real life does flow on those dates too!)

Care to join me? I am open to scheduling a 1 hour max teleclass where I guide and coach a group of people through the GLD process over the phone – please leave a comment on this post by Sunday 26 October if you are interested in attending.

The call would likely be held morning of Monday 3 November, Japan time – that’s Sunday evening on the US east coast. There is no charge for this particular class, other than whatever toll charges you incur to call. I will use a US-based phone conferencing system and dial in from Japan – at about $7 /hour if I don’t use Skype.

- Mark McClure

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The 5 Minute Career Mentor – Listening

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Here’s the first in an occasional series of relatively short posts written from a mentoring perspective.

In other words, this is knowledge I gained from others and have found useful in my life and career.

1- “The Method Of Polite Conversation”

This technique is really simple and can work well when talking to someone else or in small groups (such as a well-run meeting):

While one person is speaking, the other(s) stay silent.

Try it out first with a friend  you trust.

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Google Career Coaching Questions

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Since Google is well known for being a great place to work and following on from Tuesday’s post on Google TechTalks Coaching , below is my current list of questions about coaching and mentoring within the Big ‘G’.

To get the creative juices flowing I used my trusty copy of MindGenius and generated a simple outline mind map.

Then as I started to think about the keywords on the mind map, I came up with more questions than the map suggests. The imaginative power of mind maps!

Google Career Coaching & Goals

1- Coaches:

1.1 External:
What is the selection process for being chosen as a Google Coach?

1.2 Internal:
Are there internal (full time) coaches within Google?

2- Dreams:

2.1 Vision:
- How do Google staffers find the “Dreams” exercise, along with the “small child” discovery suggestions?

- Are coached employees sharing their “Google Dreams” with others as mentioned on the video? (a kind of “dream teamwork”, if you like!)

3- Coaching:

3.1 Group:
- Is there coaching for teams at Google? (If so, how is this delivered?)

3.2 Private:
- Is coaching done on campus (meeting rooms) or via telephone? (and presumably not from the staffer’s cubicle.)
- In what ways does coaching of the ‘Google Dream’ overlap (or intertwine) with personal dreams expressed by the employee?

3.3 Scale:
- What is the ratio of coaches to eligible employees?
*For coaching to have any noticeable impact on personal (and group) performance, there is an element of “critical mass” which is not necessarily achieved by providing only executive or C-level coaching.)

3.4 Employees:
- How do employees become eligible for individual or group coaching?
(In some corporations, coaching is only an executive or director level ‘perk’ and/or may be used as part of an ‘outplacement’ strategy for politely culling unwanted senior staff. Sad but true.)

3.5 Locations:
- In which Google sites are coaches available?
(although phone or Net-based video-conference coaching can be done regardless of location, time zones and other regional factors are important.)

4- Trust:

4.1 HR:
- What is the involvement of Human Resources department in the administration of the career coaching programs?
- In what way is the coaching assessed or monitored to be of benefit to Google and to the employee?

4.2 Confidentiality:
- How private and confidential are the coaching sessions?
(These are 2 of the main benefits in using external coaches – plus there is reduced possibility of a conflict of interest).

5- Mentoring:

5.1 Formalized?:
- Is there a mentoring program and in what ways does it overlap or coexist with coaching?
(Mentors are usually existing employees with knowledge and guidance to share. This is different from coaching, where the coach is helping the client walk their own path – in this case one that is also hopefully in broad alignment with the Google highway.)

5.2 Managers:
- In what ways are managers (and relevant non-managers too) trained (and coached) to be effective mentors?

Well, that’s it for 23:53 hours on a Friday night!

While I don’t expect Google to reveal “competitive advantage” information, I believe there’s a lot of benefit to be gained by sharing yet more reasons why Google is rated to be such an impressive company to work for.

I will post further on this topic when appropriate.

- Mark ‘Do No Evil’ McClure ;-)

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Perfection In Such An Average Day – Part 1 of 2

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There’s an old, somewhat worn out personal development / goal setting exercise that usually goes something like this:

“Imagine you’ve just six months to live.

What would you do?
Where would you go?

Who would you spend time with?”

I (and some of my coaching clients) invariably have trouble imagining our own future demise – it’s been no easy matter to get anything out of this exercise.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve been so taken with how Mitch Albom approached the topic, in his 1997 best seller, Tuesdays With Morrie.

On Mitch’s thirteenth Tuesday visit with the ailing Professor Morrie, he’s suddenly struck by the fact that he last saw Morrie standing up over 16 years ago.

And that leads to a rather beautiful and impromptu question to his former professor:

“What if you had one day perfectly happy, I asked?
What would you do?”
(page 175, Tuesdays with Morrie)

Want to know what Morrie replied?

Then listen to Tape 1 of Mitch’s edited recording for Morrie’s Perfect Day.
(It’s a 5 minute audio clip – listen online or download).
Oct 2011 Update: The link appears to have changed or been removed.

Please stop and do that now.

So, having heard Morrie’s voice (or read his words), does the title of this post ring any bells for you?

Sure did for me!

Wishing you much perfection in this average weekend.

All being well, I’ll post part 2 on Tuesday.

- Mark McClure

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