Tag Archives: career development

Career and Leadership Inspiration from a Local Business Executive

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Here in the Raleigh – Durham – Chapel Hill area of Raleigh, the Triangle Business Journal sponsors a quarterly breakfast meeting called the “Power Breakfast” where business executives from across our region gather to network and hear from powerful area business leaders.

Machelle Sanders, VP of Manufacturing & GM for RTP Campus of Biogen Idec

Friday November 2 we were inspired by Machelle Sanders, an African-American woman from a small town in Eastern North Carolina who has risen to become the VP of Manufacturing and General Manager for the over 1000 person campus of pharmaceutical industry leader Biogen Idec. Before sharing her 12 “enablers for success,” she shared briefly about herself as a servant – leader, risk taker and hard worker.

Machelle Sander’s twelve enablers for success:

1. Follow your passion. For Machelle, her passion is serving and helping others, for which a senior leadership role is an ideal platform.

2. Be able to relate to anyone. This is particular helpful in resolving and mitigating disputes.

3. Seek opportunities with different levels of responsibility. Take educated calculated risks in leaving your comfort zone. Machelle did this in leaving a long time career into quality assurance to take on manufacturing leadership.

4. Take ownership of both your accomplishment and mistakes.

5. Learn to thrive in uncertainty. Today, constant change is the norm.

6. Don’t be afraid to promote and brand yourself. Focus on your strengths.

7. Leadership is key … and it comes in many forms. It does not only mean directly managing others. Building trust is the cornerstone for establishing yourself as a leader.

8. Be watchful for fear of failure. Do not let failure derail you or hold you back.

9. Inspire others. (And Machelle, you did that superbly in this session!)

10. Rewards those who excel. This helps motivate them. And rewards are not just financial.

11. Maintain your authenticity.

12. Be self-aware of your own blind spots.

If you are in the area, consider coming to this quarterly series. And for anyone who wants to provide an innovate career development framework for your organization, please contact me to discuss my career road mapping services.

Career Road Mapping / Career Management – Part 2

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It has been awhile! Back in April I published Part 1 of this series about career road mapping, an innovative approach that I offer to corporations and professional societies using one page career maps of successful professionals within a targeted functional area as a way of providing career guidance and ideas to junior employees. Here is a link to that blog.

I presented this approach to a standing room only crowd in October at the North Carolina SHRM (Society of Human Resource Management) state conference. In addition to presenting the career road mapping process, I also provided an overview of five career development concepts:

1. A good career development plan will have a mix of both short term development goals and activities to improve skills in the current position, and of looking out 3, 5 or even 10 years at long term development goals.
2. Ultimately, each employee owns and is responsible for his or her own career. Only the individual themselves know what they want out of a career, what they like and dislike, what really gets them enthused about their vocation. We can provide tools to help employees discover their optimal vocations, but they need to do the work and explore within themselves.
3. Give thought to whether you prefer to be a specialist with a deep expert knowledge in a specific area, or a generalist who understands more of the “big picture” and enjoys moving across different functional areas. Also it is possible to switch between being a specialist and a generalist during one’s career.
4. Analyzing the next position should not be an emotional decision, but instead an analytical one taking into account the importance of different attributes of a job, and comparing current position to the possible new position. See below for a tool to use to do this exercise.

5. Mentoring is one of the most productive yet underutilized tools to use in career development. In fact I recommend having multiple mentors that could include leaders in your current position, someone in the job you aspire to next, and perhaps someone in the same life situation. Link to my August 17th blog on mentoring.

If you would like to discuss how I can help your organization with a career road mapping project, or if you want a copy of my presentation on this topic, please contact me, [email protected]