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Before making a leap to a new department where you will be performing different responsibilities, you need to make sure that your new boss understands that there will be a learning curve for you before you will be able to contribute fully. Don’t be afraid to clarify expectations before making the leap into a new arena.

Escaping a bad boss is not the only (or even the best) reason to make a lateral move. When organizations grow slowly or are cutting back, lateral movements are an important career option. A sideways move can provide you with an opportunity to expand your base of skills and knowledge in a particular area, or across different functional areas of the organization. If you have a good relationship with your boss, you should be able ask for his or her advice and help in making a job change within the company. Perhaps your boss can refer you to some other area of the company. Changing departments can give you the breadth of experience that will be critical for success later. Lateral moves increase your portfolio of marketable skills and widen your network of personal contacts. If you want to learn new skills, seek the stimulation of new colleagues, relocate to a different location, or transfer into a faster-growing area of your organization, you could benefit from repositioning yourself by seeking a lateral move.

Finding a Mentor

Having a mentor can be critical to the growth and success of your career. But it can very hard to find the right person to mentor you. So, what can you do to find someone to nurture your talents and career?

The first key is to “know yourself.” The more you know about your own talents, personality, strengths, and weaknesses, the better able you will be to define what kind of mentor you need to help guide your career.

In some cases, mentoring relationships develop naturally out of school, workplace, or personal relationships. For my friend Adam, a fortuitous relationship with his teacher, Kim, became the foundation of a lifelong mentoring relationship with Kim and her husband, Joe.

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But this wasn’t a relationship that Adam sought out. It was one that literally fell into his lap. Because most of us can’t count on that kind of luck to guide our progress through the workplace, we have to be more proactive about seeking out mentors.

Blaze Konkol is a good example of someone who does this quite naturally. When Blaze decided to change careers from management consulting to counseling psychology, he was particularly interested in combining business and psychology. After hearing me speak at a graduate seminar, he took the initiative to contact me, at first for career advice, and later about the possibility of working together. Because Blaze views me as someone who has knowledge and contacts in the field he wishes to enter after graduation, he has very proactively solicited my advice and been open about his desire for me to mentor him. I, in turn, have learned a great deal from him and appreciate the assertive way in which he manages his own career and seeks out the connections that make the most sense to him instead of allowing himself to become alienated.

Blaze found me himself. But if you don’t know anyone personally whom you might want to mentor you, you can ask for referrals from friends and colleagues in order to tap into other peoples’ networks. The clearer you can be about who (or what) you are looking for, the easier it will be to get connected to the right people.

Keep an open mind about who your mentor or mentors might be. Because a mentor is someone who can help you grow in an area that is important to you, you might be looking for more than one person. Perhaps you need one mentor to help you with your writing and another person to help strategize your career moves. Or you might be looking for a role model.

Mentoring can be a two-way street rather than just a top-down experience from manager to staff or employer to employee. Senior staff who feel hopelessly out of date can benefit from the savvy and expertise that younger co-workers can bring to the table. One marketing communications executive developed a reverse-mentoring program

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where the younger employees who have grown up on computers match up with older workers who aren’t as techno-savvy. Joining youthful know-how with senior influence can foster strong collaborations along with skill development.

Reverse mentoring went mainstream when former GE CEO Jack Welch insisted that several hundred of his top managers hook up with younger employees in order to learn about the Internet. Since that time, reverse mentoring has become a popular managerial strategy to manage intergenerational differences, understand younger consumers, and generate new ideas.

The hardest part of reverse mentoring is getting the teacher to be patient and articulate enough to teach the mentee. Younger mentors can also encounter some resistance from their senior-level mentees, who might be concerned about looking incompetent or getting too chummy with the staff. One solution to that dilemma is to use outside mentors from local colleges, universities, youth groups, and so on who are not part of the org chart.

Mentoring Exercise

Make a list of five people whom you admire. They can be famous people or people who stand out in some way for you by way of their character traits, qualities, talents, accomplishments, personality, and so on.

1.___________________________________________________________

2.___________________________________________________________

3.___________________________________________________________

4.___________________________________________________________

5.___________________________________________________________

(continues)

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(continued)

Identify five reasons why you admire each of them; be as specific as you can.

Person 1: __________________

1.___________________________________________________________

2.___________________________________________________________

3.___________________________________________________________

4.___________________________________________________________

5.___________________________________________________________

Person 2: __________________

1.___________________________________________________________

2.___________________________________________________________

3.___________________________________________________________

4.___________________________________________________________

5.___________________________________________________________

Person 3: __________________

1.___________________________________________________________

2.___________________________________________________________

3.___________________________________________________________

4.___________________________________________________________

5.___________________________________________________________

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