7 Proactive Things To Do To Help You Develop Professionally – A Guest Blog

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I am pleased to share this guest blog written by Tracie Johnson

Professional development is one of the most important aspects of your career. Unless you go back to school and get your Ph.D., it’s hard to know what will help you make a bigger impact on your career. At this point, there are so many resources that it can be difficult to know where you should start first. Here are things you can do to help you develop professionally.

1. Get Clear on Your Personal and Professional Goals.  Create a list of long-term and short-term goals that have meaning for you personally and professionally. Then create a plan on how you’re going to achieve each goal. Where possible, ensure that the steps related to your goals are measurable.

2. Keep a Journal.  You can use a journal to keep track of things like your professional development activities, personal development, and general progress. Don’t make it too long; you don’t want to wear yourself out or give up if it’s not a productive activity. You can also use your journal to schedule some time every week to review where you’re at professionally, journal about your goals, and create plans for achieving them.

3. Think Career Not Jobs.  Make sure you’re thinking about your career and not just a job. This will help you to have a longer view of things and allow for more holistic thinking about the various aspects of your professional life. For example, if you keep changing jobs because they don’t fulfill you, think about what might be missing at work or how you can change your current situation to work.

You may also advance your education and build your skills when thinking long-term about your career. If you hold the same job for a long time, think about how to build on your current position and advance while still being in the same role.

4. Find or Get a Mentor.  A mentor can help you with your professional and personal development by giving you advice on a specific area or simply having someone who understands what it’s like in the workplace.

Sometimes people will use the term “mentor” when they mean someone who has similar responsibilities to them, but there are still benefits to having a mentor, even if it’s not in a supervisory role.

5. Ask for Feedback. Asking for feedback is one of the best ways to improve your professional performance. While you can ask for feedback from your boss or a direct supervisor, you can also ask peers and colleagues who may be more willing to provide more honest feedback. One way to ensure that you get meaningful feedback is to give the person clear instructions on the areas you want them to focus on. Sometimes, people will be too afraid to tell someone they need to work on something if they don’t give clear instructions.

Networking and making key connections can really help with career movement and opportunity

6. Network.  Connecting with others can help you learn and build relationships, with is a great way to improve your professional skills. You can meet people during workshops and other educational opportunities, find people at work that you can learn from, join online forums and groups, or reach out to your contacts by phone or email and ask them whether they’d be willing to connect with you. The more networking opportunities you have, the more likely you will be able to meet new people and develop professional relationships.

7. Learn a New Skill.  There are so many ways to learn new skills that can help you improve your professional development. Some common examples include studying a new programming language, completing a short course, or reading more books on your current area of interest. You might also consider learning how to market yourself better, which is probably something you haven’t had much training in if it wasn’t required at work.

Conclusion:  If you want to improve your professional standing, you can’t just rely on what is happening at work. While it’s understandable that you may be too busy with your job to take on extra responsibilities, there are proactive things that you can do to help build your skills and further improve your professional career.

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Total Engagement Consulting offers companies and organizations an innovative approach to help retain and grow their employees through the Total Engagement Career Mapping offering.

The importance of courage in being an inclusive leader

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Very often when I am providing clients training in being effective diversity council or employee resource groups leaders, I include the Deloitte model of the 6 attributes of being an inclusive leader. The six are: Commitment, Courage, Cognizance, Curiosity, Cultural Intelligence and Cooperation. One of the six that leaders often find most challenging is courage. In a recent training with a client, 8 of the 14 participants, over half, shared that they found courage the most challenging of the six attributes. In fact, for two other recent clients, courage was either the most or second most challenging

A guest blog I published in 2018, written by Dr. Cecilia Orellana-Rojas, the National Diversity Council’s Senior VP of Strategy and Research, highlighted the importance of courage in diversity leadership. In “Leaders Must Exercise Courage to Lead Inclusively,” Cecilia provided several examples of courageous corporate leadership around pressing diversity issues in our country.

I have now developed a short training module on being a courageous inclusive leader. Some main points from this session:

What is courageous leadership? Courage is a powerful word – its Latin origin is “cor,” meaning heart. Courage is the mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear or difficulty. A leader is someone who has commanding authority or influence and can motivate a group of people to act toward achieving a common goal.

So putting the two together: a great courageous leader is someone who has influence and can effectively motivate a group to act towards achieving a common goal because they have the mental and moral strength and will persevere and withstand danger despite their fears and the difficulty of the challenge. (source: “What’s Courage Have to Do With Leadership” – THRIVE by Dagmar Meachem.

One element of courage is being brave and breaking new ground

Two elements of Courage. From the Deloitte inclusive leadership model, two elements of inclusive courage include:
• Humility – being aware of your own personal strengths and weaknesses. That includes seeking the contributions of others – not going it alone.
• Bravery – being an agent for change and the positive impact diversity and inclusion can have. And that includes challenging organizational attitudes and practices that promote homogeneity.

Eight ways to develop courageous leadership. You should read the article from Socoal yourself to see all eight and to do your own self-assessment, but they include having the courage to seek feedback, having the courage to innovate, being able to admit mistakes, letting go of “precious practices” and being able to engage in “difficult conversations.”

Please do be in touch if I can provide a workshop on this great topic for your organization!