Investing in your development
Following on from our last blog about investing time, money, and directed energy in your own future, we thought it might be helpful to continue the conversation. In our Executive Coaching practices, we see some critical moments when it is particularly worth backing yourself and investing in your own development. There appears to be a “sweet spot” for development at these times, where unfurling your potential can be accelerated through coaching, and where return on investment seems particularly high.
Here are some we identified:
· You want to move to a different organisation with a different culture
· You want to get a promotion
· You have a substantial role with more responsibility / exposure than before
· Your first managerial role
· You step up as a leader of a larger team
· You know you need to understand the strategy and politics better
· Your market is changing fast / you are faced with great uncertainty in your market
· You are dissatisfied with your career and want change
Top tips to take control and develop yourself:
1. Decide what you are interested to develop. Not everybody knows what they want immediately. A great coach who enables you to explore and identify suitable goals for you could provide great value.
2. Depending on your development goals, you could seek out a course, programme, accreditation or executive coach to meet your learning objectives and help you apply your learning to your world.
3. Avoid the ruts by staying competitive in your field. You’ll need to explore and identify trends. And it may mean developing toward your next career. Current realities suggest the chances are that in your lifetime you will need to change track more than once.
Above all, be impatient to discover your potential, be steady in the pursuit of new levels of capability and grab opportunities to apply what you are learning.
We would love to hear about your critical moments, how coaching helped, and what your views are with the benefit of hindsight.
