look out for a new podcast on the Factory next month with one of the true leaders of career development in the world. While you are waiting why not check out the interviews with the likes of John Krumboltz, Janet Lenz, Norm Amundson, Spencer Niles and Robert Pryor.
Mentoring is one of those ideas that seem intuitively sensible and worthy of widespread implementation. But how effective is mentoring? Does it lead to any positive outcomes?
The incompetent – this is the chronically under-prepared speaker. They don’t understand their topic, but this doesn’t seem to stop them. They will arrive with overhead slides (yes overheads), photocopied in black and white cheaply at the newsagents.
When you set a career goal you are highlighting that there is something about your current circumstances that you want to change, and that you will be happier when you achieve your goal of changing your circumstances. Such thinking means accepting two premises: firstly, my current circumstances are not making me happy (if they were why change?), and secondly, that when I achieve my goal I will be happier.
Most of us have had to endure some of the extremes of management dogma throughout our careers, and most of us submit to some form of performance management at work. If you ever suspected that some of hoops you were made to jump through were unnecessary, unhelpful or unfair, then you might want to make Jeffrey Pfeffer your pin up boy.
I have decided that I have become unemployable. This does not reflect some mid-life crisis of confidence, rather I have just realised that every career move I have made has been the result of near death experiences in meetings.
Organisations are spending the equivalent of the gross domestic product of Peru on learning about the mysteries of this new generation, while presumably learning to abandon big buttery wines for something all together more crispy and grapefruity. We are getting bombarded by a load of nonsense about the needs, values and expectations of this so-called group and led to believe that there are genuine differences when compared to older generations.
