Today’s Morning Buzz is brought to you by Matt Horn, the Director of Local Government Services for MRB Group, and a big-time rule follower (I once turned a friend into the National Football League for talking too descriptively about a Monday Night Football production without the explicit written permission of the National Football League). For more wholly original content, check out his LinkedIn page.
What I’m watching: Just emerged from a sea of 2023 local election coverage, only to be plunged into a sea of 2024 national election coverage. The seas are angry, my friends.
What I’m reading: Designing Your Life, by Bill Burnett. Trying to figure out how design thinking might help me accelerate my career goals *and* pay more attention to my fantasy pickleball team…
What I’m listening to: The Kids of Rutherford County, a New York Times podcast about challenges in Tennessee’s juvenile justice system.
In my last Morning Buzz installment, I talked about creating a personal development plan – setting clear career goals for yourself, and pursuing them relentlessly. In addition to the obvious career progression objectives of development planning, continuous learning should be a core value inherent to all of us. Even though local government has been around for centuries, the issues we face are constantly evolving, and the people pursuing their solutions are getting more creative and prolific. Case studies, blogs, Morning Buzz articles…all great tools for staying more-than-current in our pursuit for career excellence.
That said, if we’re going to get better at our chosen craft, or at life generally, we can only go so far on our own.
- Grab your professional development plan and identify those development areas where a mentor can be most beneficial.
- Consider people you know in the profession, who have distinguished themselves as thought and/or practice leaders in your priority development focus areas.
- Reach out to two or three of those folks and gauge their interest in mentoring you.
In your conversations with potential mentors, consider the following criteria for a good mentorship match:
- Gauge the potential mentor’s core values and professional path. Do these align with your goals for career progression?
- Does their communication style make you comfortable? You’ll be challenged to be vulnerable with this person. Can you sense that connection?
- Is the person close enough, or technologically savvy enough to meet regularly?
- Can the person commit to two to three hours per month of conversations with you?
Once you’ve identified a mentor, establish your plan for the relationship. How often and in what format will you meet? How will you and your mentor prepare for each meeting? How will your conversations be memorialized and your progress tracked? You may consider putting all of this in writing, and having each of you retain a copy. It might sound overly formal, but the most frequent relationship collapses in this environment come from blurry parameters around how you will work together.
One more thing to consider – your development needs will not be static over the course of your career. The mentor you select in this stage may carry you far, and then a year or two from now, you might need support in another area. Conduct regular self-assessments to determine where your development needs are at any given point. Share these results with your mentor, and seek their advice on how to adjust your relationship, or to end it in favor of a new mentorship.
And hey, if you’re a seasoned practitioner in your field of choice, why not step up and make yourself available as a mentor? If you’re still practicing, keep your eye out for early career professionals who could use your guidance. Connect with your HR leadership to let them know that you’d like to support the development of folks in your organization. It’s tough to imagine that they’d turn you down…
Professional development and lifelong learning are continuous pursuits, requiring a diversity of efforts to be effective. Much of this you can do on your own, but why not seek the advice and counsel of folks who’ve already worn paths on this journey? A mentor is one more tool to ensure that you achieve the career dreams you’ve laid out for yourself.