Month: January 2019

One Mentor is Not Enough – Build a Board of Directors

Alyssa Born Leave a comment

There is no such thing as an ideal mentor.

That’s an idea it took me a long time to understand. Every person I had heard speak about mentoring spoke about their mentor as if he or she were a omniscient fairy godmother guiding them through life.

I tried finding that one person who would guide me through the ups and downs of my career, imagining teachers and professionals I admired as that go-to person, trying out formal mentoring programs to no avail.

Then I heard a take on mentoring that completely changed the way I looked at it – the idea that everyone should have their own personal board of directors filling that role of mentor and advisor.

It took a while for the ideas to stick, but when it did, it made so much sense. I don’t depend on just one person for advice in any other area of my life, why would I expect one person fill that need professionally?

Like an organization needs a board full of people from different backgrounds with varied experiences and perspectives, so too do professionals. No lone person will have had the same exact experiences you will, so having a pool of trusted advisors will help you grow and develop in a variety of situations.

For your board of directors to be effective, your group needs to be varied. Having two people whose careers and lives mirror each other won’t necessarily be the most helpful to your development. Look for people in your life and your network who fill roles like:

  • Someone who’s career you admire
  • Someone who’s experience is similar to yours
  • Someone who is in your field, industry or niche
  • Someone who is not in your field, industry or niche
  • Someone who is at your experience level
  • Someone just a couple steps ahead of you experience-wise
  • Someone with a lot of experience
  • Someone who will help connect you to others to grow your own network

You don’t need to fill out your board of directors all at once – that will happen over time. You do need to make sure there is variety in who you’re approaching for advice, though. It may seem like quite an undertaking to find people, but I’m sure if you take a good look at your own network, your board of directors will begin to take shape.

Looking amongst your own circles makes a lot of sense when you think about it. For a mentorship to be successful, there needs to be trust, common values and common interests. A mentor needs to be someone you respect and with whom you mesh, so looking to people you already have a connection with is a great place to start.

If you feel there’s little variety in your network, try casting your net just a bit wider to your PRSA chapter, your alma mater’s alumni network and your network’s network. Asking to connect with strangers becomes a bit easier when you already know you have something in common.

One-on-one coaching like a traditional mentoring relationship may work for some, but it’s not the only way. Like any other relationship, a mentorship should grow and change over time. Being mentored is an ongoing process, not an accomplishment or item to check off along your career path. It’s something that takes work, time and dedication. And much like other things in your life – your relationships, your professional development, your own well-being – you get out of it exactly what you put into it.

Looking to learn more about building a successful mentoring relationship? Join us as we partner with the College of Fellows for Supercharge your career: How finding or being a mentor can transform your professional development, a webinar to discuss the ins and outs of mentoring. Register now.

(P.S. The first draft of this post contained an ode to my own personal board of directors –  a zany group of professionals who have helped guide me through my career. While everyone should have their own board of directors, no two groups will ever be identical and I think it’s important for everyone to find what works for them. They know who they are and know how deeply I value them. However, the story of how our paths have crossed is one I’m always happy to tell to anyone who asks.)

Image uploaded from iOSIn her fourth year on PRSA’s New Professionals Section’s executive committee, Robyn serves as 2019 chair. She’s a native of southern New Jersey and currently resides in Washington, D.C., by way of Pittsburgh and South Carolina. Robyn currently works for Airports Council International – North America (ACI-NA), a trade association representing North America’s airports, and holds a bachelor’s degree in Public Relations and a master’s degree in media arts and technology, with a focus on creative media practices, both from Duquesne University. She likes to spend her spare time cooking, reading, exploring, crocheting and spending time with her tail-less cat, Izzy. Learn more about her on her website or find her on Twitter & talk to her!

New Year, New Pros

Robyn Rudish-Laning Leave a comment

Each year, the turning of the calendar marks a time of transition for the New Professionals Section. In the weeks leading up to the holidays, the incoming and outgoing committee chairs begin the transition with a flurry of calls, messages and documents exchanged. And then we set off to plan.

When I started digging in to planning back in September, I found there was a lot I didn’t know. Despite being a member of the Section for four years and on the Exec Committee for three, I had a hard time articulating what our goals were. As a committee, we had always done a pretty good job of executing on our individual goals, but we didn’t have a strategic plan or overall goals guiding our work.

As I began the process of meeting with current committee members to select the 2019 Executive Committee, I heard a lot of the same struggles – members weren’t sure what we were working towards or didn’t feel like we had a clear mission or goals to guide us – and decided that we needed a strategic plan. With guidance from other sections and groups, as well as other more experienced professionals, I began to craft a strategic plan for our New Professionals Section with three clear goals that our committee would work toward in 2019.

They are:

  1. Provide valuable tools and resources for professional development to our members;
  2. Position our Section and our members as thought leaders; and
  3. Clearly demonstrate the value of being a PRSA and New Pros member.

Why these three goals? Well, there are a few reasons. First, they are inline with PRSA’s Strategic Plan. Second, they address feedback we’ve heard from members over the past couple of years and are speak to our mission and vision for the Section – to serve members by helping them grow professionally. That is, after all, why we join professional organizations, right?

When it comes to professional development, the needs of new professionals vary a bit from those of mid-level and experienced practitioners. While leadership training is great, and can often be useful, many of us are working towards the next promotion or the next job, and trying to figure out what skills and knowledge we need to have to get there. Maybe we don’t see ourselves as leaders yet because we’re not sure we know the things we need to know or are asking the right questions.

There are two things new pros seem to need to develop professionally – access to opportunities that provide actionable resources they can use pretty much immediately and guidance. This year, we’re going to tackle both.

Through a partnership with PRSA’s College of Fellows, we will make mentoring more accessible to new professionals. Mentors are crucial to professional development and the mentor/mentee relationship is unique. Experienced professionals often have a wealth of knowledge they’re more than happy to share with aspiring and new professionals and their guidance on navigating through career obstacles is invaluable. Mentoring is a two-way relationship, though, and nurturing and maintaining that relationship may not always come naturally. As we partner with the College of Fellows, we’ll explore not only the benefits of having and being a mentor, but what really goes into the relationship, what to expect and how it changes over the course of your career.

Since January is National Mentoring Month, we decided to dive right in and begin the conversation with a joint webinar on Jan. 31 at 3 p.m. ET. This webinar, “Supercharge your career: How finding or being a mentor can transform your professional development,” is only available to members of the New Professionals Section and the College of Fellows and will feature two mentor-mentee pairs who will share the ins and outs for fostering a mutually beneficial mentoring relationship. We hope you’ll join us for this discussion.

Actionable resources, like checklists, templates and guides, are something we’ll be working on bringing to our professional development opportunities this year, starting with our Summits.

Last year, we hosted our first in-person networking and learning summit, “Careers in Progress” in New York City. The event was a success, bringing together new professionals from across the country and industry professionals to talk about practical tactics and insights. This year, we’re expanding our summits to three different locations over the course of the year – Silicon Valley, Washington, D.C., and Chicago. In addition to sessions on tactics and trends, we’ll be adding an afternoon workshop to help attendees master a skill. We’re still working on planning each of these events, so keep an eye out for an announcement on dates and programs for each.

“Thought leader” may not be the first word you’d use to describe yourself as a new professional, but our members are skilled in many areas and we want to help showcase these talents. Our blog, The Edge, is an excellent platform for sharing information, tips and ideas. We encourage all members to flex your skills by writing for The Edge and use published posts to build your portfolio.

Professional development and being a thought leader aren’t just limited to talking about skills and successes, though. We all struggle sometimes and struggle a bit through our career. No one will be better able to relate to and understand the obstacles new pros face than your peers. The Edge is also a good place to talk about those issues and topics that are important to you as you make your way through your early career.

We hope that you’ll see the value in being a PRSA member – and a Section member – as a new professional through the opportunities that are made available to you, but we’re also going to do a better job at showcasing some of the benefits to being a New Pros member and the value that we find in it. One way we’ll do this is by better sharing some of the more behind-the-scenes projects that we’re working on to improve our Section. We want you to be just as excited about being a new pro as we are.

We look forward to what’s ahead this year and to better getting to know you. We want to hear from you, so whether you’ve got a question that needs an answer, a success you’d like to share or an idea for something we can do better, please reach out to us on our social media channels, through our MyPRSA discussion forum, or directly to me by email.

Happy 2019, new pros!

– Robyn
  2019 PRSA New Professionals Section Chair