Are you finding new hires and promotions are planned for this summer in your organization?
Although I typically think of summer as a lazy, almost “on autopilot” time of year, I notice every day that I’m getting emails from clients announcing job changes. Some are struggling with the onboarding process and helping to ease someone else’s transitions. Others are at the center of their own transitions, moving up in organizations, and often finding a new skill set is now required.
No matter where you are in your career, challenges and advancements will demand you learn and grow on a constant basis. There are times when you’ll have the luxury to add new skills over time; there are times, especially in job change situations, where you’ll need to quickly come up to speed on a new skill.
I’d like to believe that I embrace new skills easily. The truth is probably a bit more complicated, perhaps for you, as well. I embrace the thought of new skills far more readily than the actual adoption of a new skill. And yet, thoughts aren’t skills, and so even I find myself looking, sometimes, for a way to quickly adopt a new skill. Making that new skill usable, as part of my organizational toolkit.
For me, the answer lies in hiring someone to help me. A coach who can help me take a closer look at what skills I have and the relative strength of each and compare those tools to the ones I now need. Which will be new skills and which will be refinements on an existing skill? Its’ an exercise I find so helpful, that I pass the suggestion along as often as I can.
A coach can help make high impact changes in a short time. Having someone who understands where I need to be versus where I am now, is invaluable in helping me make mid-course directions as I head from Point A to Point B.
You might think it odd that someone who helps to coach others needs to be coached himself. Like you, I want to be the most persuasive, the most insightful, and the best me I can be. For me to be successful, my leadership skills need to be finely tuned. You may have other skills that need tuning, but there are few among us who couldn’t benefit from a quick tune-up now and then.
If you’ve worked with a coach before, you know that often it is a multi-month process. We understand that when a tune-up is all that’s needed, six months working with a coach may be time spent poorly. At Boxer Advisors, LLC, we understand just how valuable your time is, and so we offer quick start coaching, a coach/coachee relationship that extends for one month and is useful for those skill refinements, or times when you need to quickly integrate one new skill.
Let’s face it, summer may be filled with lazy, hazy days, but we can use them to our advantage to make sure our skillsets are in top notch condition. While our colleagues are caught up in transitions, we can slip our own transitions in and emerge this fall as a better version of ourselves.
Boxer Advisors, LLC, is a full-service consulting, training and coaching firm with more than 50 professional consultants, facilitators, and coaches and carefully selected partners providing services to Federal agencies and Fortune 1000 companies since 1996.
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