Newsletter December 4, 2008 Enhance Your Career - Get an Accountability Partner
One of the most important qualities to have today, if we want to develop and enhance our careers, is the ability to be pro-active.
We can either take charge of our life, making it what we want it to be, and be pro-active, or we can let life control us and become reactive.
We all can at times become reactive. Some people have a
reactive personality and are like that all the time. Things
don't go as planned. They confront obstacles that seem
insurmountable.They feel like giving up.The reactive person
moves into "can't do"mode, blames someone else for creating
the problem and allows him/herself to be overcome by a sense
of powerlessness, even hopelessness.
We need to consciously develop pro-activity which is Stephen Covey's 1st habit of highly effective people. The pro-active person takes initiative, goes into "nothing is going to stop me" mode; we can do this; let's think of another way around this; takes ownership of finding a solution; generates enthusiasm and energy all around him/herself. Pro-active people have a fundamental mindset that sees them able to influence any situation for effective and constructive outcomes.
This newsletter will encourage you to be pro-active, to take positive
and constructive action to change your professional or personal life or
your organisation. The articles have all been written in response to
questions from people tending to be reactive.
The 3 articles below demonstrate a pro-active response to situations.
Enhance Your Professional and Career Development - Get an Accountability Partner This is a response to someone who was very frustrated at not being able to afford the cost of coaching, yet wanting someone to support her career growth. I encouraged her to think laterally of alternatives. This was one of them that she chose.
Be the Change You Want To See in Your Organisation - Look After Your Colleagues
The article in the last newsletter On "Looking After Your People....." was written for leaders and managers. Someone made the comment: "We rely on them. If they don't do it, there's nothing we can do." That's not true. Every employee can be a leader in his/her area of influence. This is about how you can do that.
Make a Difference - Send a Hand-written Card. One of the biggest criticisms of leaders and managers by employees is that they don't get regular feed-back - either positive or negative. This is one very meaningful way of giving positive and constructive feed-back, of valuing employees and their contribution to your organisation. The message needs to extend beyond the organisation out to our circle of colleagues and friends as well.
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Are you someone who begins
each week with clear goals you want to achieve that week?
Are you highly motivated to
achieve them?
Are you also very good at
knowing the steps you need to take to bring those goals to fruition?
BUT, do you then find that
you lose focus easily?
Do you have an interest in so
many things that you can be drawn into other things that aren’t your priority
at that time?
Or, are you easily stressed,
and then lose momentum?
Do things coming from out of
left field throw you out of kilter and see you distracted from your goals?
If this is you, then maybe an
Accountability Partner is just what you need to keep you focussed on your goals
and what you want to achieve both personally and professionally.
What is an Accountability Partner?
In brief, this is someone you
choose to keep you accountable for achieving your goals and creating the
professional and personal life you desire.
It may be someone within your
own organisation, but it is often more helpful to have someone from outside.
It can be one-sided with one
person being the Accountability Partner and the other consulting with that
person. It can also be two-sided with each person being the accountability
partner for each other. There is no exchange of money.
You can establish your own
working relationship, but generally what happens is that you will telephone
that person first thing every Monday morning and have a 15-20 minute phone
call. You will share your goals for that week with your Accountability Partner
who will keep a copy. You may briefly talk about what may get in the way of you
achieving those goals and how you might overcome those. The following Monday
morning the first part of your call is about how you went with the goals of the
previous week. You have to report in, and all week you know that.
Having an Accountability
Partner with whom you actually talk (rather than email), is initially about the
development of self-discipline. It is also about having to be accountable to
someone else for what you have or have not done. You can’t get away with
anything. That person, however, is not an authority figure. The emphasis is on
“partner” – someone working with you for a period of time to help you
ultimately to be accountable to yourself for creating the life and success you
desire.
The ultimate goal with Accountability Partners is that after a short time you don’t need them anymore.
You are able to keep yourself focussed no matter what presents itself. You know
and understand yourself better and what distracts you from your priorities and
can address that yourself.
What often happens, however, is that because the
two people have found the relationship so helpful, they continue it, but it is
not so much about accountability then as about peer support.
Be the Change You Want To See In Your Organisation
- Look After Your Colleagues.
A fortnight ago, in my last
newsletter, I wrote an article on “Look After Your People in These Tough Times
and They will Look After Your Organisation.” If you haven’t read it, you can
find it at http://www.peopleempowered.com.au/articles.
It was written for managers and leaders, encouraging them not to forget how
important their people are in these difficult times and to look after them. I
took the risk of assuring them that if they did, their organisation would
prosper.
I hoped that all of you who
were reading that article as individuals didn’t switch off and think that this
was not relevant to you because you aren’t a leader or a manager.
You can do a great deal. You
just need to apply all the principles and ideas in that article to the way you
relate to your colleagues.
It was Ghandi that called on
people to “be the change you want to see in your world”. His words are just as
relevant to organisational life. Many people complain about what their leaders
and managers aren’t doing and where their organisation falls short. They expect
someone else to fix things, to make them the way they would like them to be.
Ghandi calls on us to be
proactive. If you want something to change in your organisation, be that
change. Make it happen by the way you are, the way you act. If you want people
to be valued and appreciated more, then you do it and be it. Start valuing and
appreciating your colleagues. Encourage them to do it to their colleagues.
Imagine the ripple effect and how quickly change could happen in your
organisation.
If you feel that no one in
the organisation gives feedback or lets you know whether what you are doing is
worthwhile, then be that change also. Start telling your colleagues they have
done a good job. Let them know you value their skills and expertise.
Change doesn’t have to start
at the top. You can make an enormous difference by starting small at the
bottom.
Make a Difference – Send a Hand-written Card.
When did you last receive a hand-written card?
Can you even remember?
With the advent of email and cheap phone calls we rarely put pen to paper. Yet a hand-written card to someone can make a real difference to them, to your mutual relationship and to the way you feel about your life and what's important in it.
Writing a hand-written card takes time - and energy. You have to first get a card and give time to what you want to write. It's strange that we don't seem to give much time to deciding what we will write when we send an email. We just do it. Yet when we write a hand-written card there is a sense that we have to craft it in some way. That's the very reason why a hand-written card is so important and carries so much meaning.
It puts value on the person to whom we are writing that we would prioritise them as important enough to take time from our busy life to write a personal note to them. Our handwriting is unique to us and an expression of ourselves and that also gives the card an added value. We share much more of ourselves with the people to whom we connect when we write a hand-written card.
Many organisations and
businesses nowadays are creating cards for this precise purpose. Some have the
company logo and address on them.
Others create a card with an
inspiring message on the front and the company details inside in small print,
allowing plenty of blank space for the message.
If your company doesn’t have
such cards, there are a whole range of attractive cards available at newsagents
and other outlets for as little as $1.00 that can be used.
These hand-written cards can
be used
to follow-up with people you
may have met at a networking event, a conference or meeting,
to thank someone for
something they have done for you,
to congratulate someone for
an achievement,
to thank employees for a
contribution they have made to the organisation, or a particular project.
There’s also all the obvious things for which
handwritten cards can be used, like expressing sympathy on the death of a
family member, congratulating someone on an engagement, wedding, birthday or
the birth of a child.
Then there’s Christmas coming
up. Who sends Christmas cards anymore? Do we just sign our names to the bottom,
or do we connect with the person to whom we are sending the card by writing a
message that reflects the importance of our relationship.
So how does all this make a difference?
Handwritten cards are about
valuing and appreciating people, letting them know that we are prepared to
spend time on them. We are living in a society that moves at such a pace that
it is very easy to spend so much time on “things” and lose touch with the fact
that people are the most important thing in this world.
It doesn’t take a lot of time
to hand write a message because there is limited space on a card. That is why
they are so good.
If you are in business, a
hand-written card is certainly a way to be remembered because your card will
stand out from the masses of paper that cross a person’s desk in any one day.
If writing hand-written notes to people who inspire, motivate and empower your
professional life and career becomes part of your way of interacting with
people, it will add a uniqueness to your personal and professional branding.
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