Hi ,
This week’s Better Leadership Blueprint was inspired by a client who works in a technical and male-dominated space (she’s a woman) who was struggling to find mentors and models to inspire her professional development.
Read time: 1 minutes
Got mentors?
What do you do if there’s a lack of strong mentors or leaders in your workplace?
We’ve all been there in some way or another:
Educating our boss(es) on things that seem pretty basic to us
Talking our boss down if they’re prone to histrionics
Dealing with a boss who’s tone-deaf or struggles to communicate
Listening to a leader drone on and on, oblivious to the obvious disinterest or lack of relevance to their listeners
Seeing other people who are probably less technically proficient than us move forward and get listened to more because of conscious or unconscious biases
In my client’s case, the 5th point was something she was really struggling with.
And the only women in leadership roles at her company were women who seemed to operate from a very different values system than she did: they seemed manipulative, dishonest, and self-absorbed.
NOT who she wanted to be taking leadership inspiration from…
Look for the inspirers
We all look for models or mentors to help us create ideas of how to shape our behaviors and our identities… for example, our parents were our first models.