We all have networks of people who play important roles in our lives and our careers. We are fortunate to have people who support us and remind us of what we are capable of accomplishing, who challenge us to never to stop growing, who advise us when we need guidance, and who hold us up when we face the unexpected.
There are so many ways we can support each other. There so many roles we all play in our personal and business networks.
I would like to focus on four of those roles and how each of us need people in our lives to fill these roles and how each of us fill these roles for the special people in our lives, in our network.
- Champions
- Mentors
- Coaches
- Friends
There are so many definitions to each of these. Feel free to define them in a way which makes sense for your network, for your career journey.
Champions are those people who we can count on to support us as we build our careers. They are the people who speak up for us when we are not in the room. They are the people we go to when we face challenges and barriers where we need greater strength than what we have on our own to overcome the barrier, to take on unjust situations. By nature, our champions have a position of high responsibility, a position of strength either different than our own or potentially more elevated than our own. Perhaps they are in a tangential part of the organization in a peer role which is highly respected by our organization. Champions are those special people who believe in us when there is a lot on the line, where we need support to overcome challenges and barriers, who help others see us for all we truly are.
Mentors are those people who guide us along our career journey. We often formalize this role to leverage their experience, knowledge and depth of character in a planful way to fill the gaps in our own tool kit, to guide us with strategies and self-growth development for us to attain our own personal goals, to more quickly or completely become the leaders we strive to be. Mentors share their wisdom and invest in us because we ask them to be that person for us and because they believe in us, in who we can become and in our strength of character.
Coaches are also people who guide us along our career journey. I have always felt coaching is a more informal approach. I think of coaching as highly situational and often, highly impromptu. We may be peer coaches, career development coaches, solid sounding boards and quite often, someone who will help us find the good in ourselves which can get lost when the challenges of life and career beat us down, leaving us broken or full of self-doubt. Coaches are there with guidance as we need it, when we need it, with a balanced perspective to help us fill in the cracks.
I saved the best for last. The more I asked people in my career to support me by playing one or more of these roles, the more I developed lasting friendships which extended beyond organizational assignments and places of employment. The best part of the first three roles is how often they developed into friendships which I carry with me in all facets of my life. In addition, the more I agreed to support rising superstars by playing one of the first three roles for them, the more they became a significant part of my life beyond a commitment to their career journey. Incredible friendships developed which filled up my life and were the most meaningful reward for accepting the responsibility to support them in their career. To me, the best role is this last one. In a way, being a friend means we all will be Champions, Mentors and Coaches for people we care about and people we support…as our friends need us and as we need them.
Author: Jay Syverson, CRO, Intuitive
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