You are listening to the Mental Offload Podcast episode 8.

Welcome to the Mental Offload Podcast where we talk about women balancing work and life. It's the podcast that combines leadership, feminism, and coaching tools so you can tackle it all with more confidence and less stress. Here's your host Ivy League MBA certified feminist coach and corporate warrior, Shawna Samuel.

Hello Offloaders. Last week we talked about the importance of thinking about your team at home. This week, it's sort of a companion episode. I'm going to talk about the concept of building a board of advisors to help you in your career and your professional development.

And I'm going to walk you through the four roles that you're going to want to have on your board. If you've ever wondered what's the difference between a mentor and a sponsor and what do I do with them anyway, this episode will help. And if you've ever felt alone as you navigate your career, I'm going to explain why a board of advisors is the antidote to that. But before we jump into that, I want to take a pause here and thank you.

I launched the Mental Offload podcast almost exactly one month ago. And one of the things that has made this so worth it to me is hearing the impact it's having on you. A listener wrote in the other day to tell me I just love your podcast. And she said I don't listen to many podcasts, but yours is just so good.

And hearing stuff like this is wonderful. And partially it's always great to get positive feedback. But also, I was nervous about putting some of this content out there, wondering if it would resonate, and frankly, a little bit hesitant to have my name and my voice out there in a very public way. So when someone I've never met or spoken to in real life contacts me to say about the episode leading through layoffs.

Hi Shawna, your podcast was enormously helpful to me and gave me approximately 100% more guidance on this topic than I've gotten from my own HR department or another listener. Wrote in about episode 3. Mom guilt is optional, she said. I've listened to this in my car on the way home.

Now I'm at home and I'm listening to it again and taking notes. I am so excited to hear stuff like that from you, my listeners, because the reason that I do this is because I truly believe that women, working moms especially, are not getting the support we need to do our work in the world without losing our minds. So when I read messages like this, it lets me know that this podcast is making an impact in your lives. It's giving you concrete support and

strategies to do the work that you want to do and feel like you are a great mom at the same time.

And plus, I just love hearing from our listeners. So please don't hesitate to reach out even if we've never met before and let me know when a topic is resonating or also let me know if there are topics you'd like to hear more about and I might feature that on a future podcast. But now I want to dig into this week's topic, which is so important. It's the topic of a board of advisors.

And let's talk about how you might build 1 and how this will benefit your professional development. Most of us have a few people who we turn to for advice about professional challenges. And here's what I've seen from a lot of women. We have one or two people who we tend to turn to for career advice.

The first group of people are friends and peers. Now everyone needs friends and peers to turn to. It's really important to have a group of people with whom you can let off steam about what's going on at your workplace professionally. And yet, there are some real downsides to looking to your friends for your career advice.

The first downside is that our friends want to support us. Sounds like an upside, but it can be a downside, and here's why. In their quest to support us, our friends #1 don't always see our blind spots #2 don't always know our workplace culture and professional norms. And #3 in their quest to support us, sometimes our friends just kind of validate what we're already thinking.

Our friends are not necessarily the best people to challenge us, to give us the hard truths, to help us navigate some of the stickier issues. That doesn't mean that they should have no role, and we'll talk about what their role is in your board of advisors in a moment. But I really encourage women to not overly rely on this group of people because frankly, sometimes they're not that helpful. Aside from letting off steam, now, there's a second group of people that many women turn to for career development, growth, and advice.

And this is our our boss or our leader. Now, a boss can absolutely be a strategic partner in your development. I've had many bosses who I worked really closely with and very transparently with when it came to achieving some of my professional objectives. They were bosses, yeah, but they were also great mentors and sponsors as well.

That said, where I see a lot of people go wrong is in trying to use your boss as a sort of work parent. We all know people who are guilty of this, right? So when I say a work parent, what do I mean by that? Here's what I mean.

Some of us treat our bosses as if they are equivalent to a parent in the sense that if we had a very approval seeking relationship with our own parent, we might replicate that in the

workplace. Constantly looking for the approval of our boss. A little stymied with what to do if our boss is not supportive of our professional development aspirations or is not effective in supporting us. Or for some people who had a more a more challenging relationship with a parent, they might treat their boss in a very similar way.

Resisting or suspicious of any of the advice given by their boss. They set up a really dysfunctional dynamic with how they show up at work, right? Because if you have a conflictual relationship with your boss, you aren't going to want to make them a partner in your development, actively pushing back on what they recommend, treating them with suspicion and skepticism. So the problem with treating a boss as a as a work parent is that we tend to give away a lot of the power over how we lead ourselves, how we lead our careers to the person sitting above us.

Now, that can be fine when that is a deliberate choice and when you have a boss that you trust. As I said, I've worked really closely and transparently with some of my leaders in the course of my career to help advance my career. But not everyone has this kind of boss or this kind of relationship. So you want to just be on the lookout for whether you're giving delegating a lot of responsibility for your career and your development to your boss and blaming them for any obstacles that you encounter.

And whether you're kind of only outside of work Advice is a circle of friends who may or may not be well equipped to advise you on how to move forward. So I want to present to you today a different model for thinking about getting career advice. Some of us have heard that you need a mentor. And so we'll talk about mentorship and, and how it's useful and where it's useful in in just a moment.

So I want to contrast how many of us tend to operate with what really works. Now think about the CEO of a company at the top of a company. If you have someone who is the CEO, seat or executive director in a non profit, for example, they work closely with a board and the role of the board when it's well run, which isn't always the case. But when it's well run, the board has several people with different areas of expertise, the different perspectives who come together to help advise the decision maker, the CEO.

So the CEO can take on board these perspectives, this advice, the experience of the board and then put it into place. Think about it, consider it, execute on it or push back on it. And I love this model for a couple of reasons. 1 is that you're drawing on the best advice and guidance of people around you and while also sitting firmly in the seat of the decision maker.

So let me talk about the four roles that every woman needs on her personal Advisory Board. Now, most of us have heard that we need a mentor. A mentor is is really a more senior person, someone who's typically a step or two, sometimes three ahead of you career wise. Mentors have been there, they've done that.

They can advise you about challenging dynamics, how to deal with certain quirky personalities, what the history is of certain set of decisions, why this person no longer speaks to that one. So great mentors have typically come up in the organization that you're working in or at a minimum in the field where you're currently working in. Sometimes mentors can help get you your next role, but that's not really the main role of a mentor. Mentorship is a two way relationship.

You get advice and support and in return a mentee looks out for her mentor. That can mean providing thoughtful information, being an ear to the ground in the organization. For example, if your mentor has introduced a new policy, you might want to let them know how the junior people on staff are taking that because that might not be something that she's hearing directly. Sometimes a mentee can even provide an understanding of new technologies.

So for example, I know a woman whose senior mentor was not heavily involved in things like social media, so her mentee was able to say, hey, this debate is happening on Twitter right now. It concerns research that you've been working on. You should probably know about it so that when it comes up at the next conference, you're prepared to address that. Mentee mentor relationships are two way relationships and and both parties benefit.

Now sometimes the mentee will end up getting more out of it than the mentor, but the point is that it is an exchange. It is a two way relationship. You absolutely can have multiple mentors, men and women, and your mentors might change and evolve over the course of your career. One thing that I that I do see a lot in corporate environments are formal mentorship programs and I think these are mixed bag in terms of success and This is why the best mentor mentee relationships develop organically.

They are a relationship built on trust and mutual goodwill, and so it can be very difficult to just have someone assign you a mentor and have it click and work and be sustainable. Now, if you're in a corporate mentorship program of some sort and you have a mentor, that's not to say that you should throw it out and not care about it. Absolutely leverage the relationships that you've been given. But what I am saying is don't rely on that to be your only mentorship relationship.

And if you're in a more senior role, don't rely on your corporation or your workplace. Don't use the excuse that your workplace doesn't have a formal mentorship program to not seek out opportunities to mentor young talent. And my guess is if you're in a senior role, you're already doing some of this. Naturally, I don't need to send you this message, but if this is your situation, just know you don't have to wait for a mentorship program to be established to do the work of a mentor.

These are often very informal relationships, and I spoke at the start of the episode about the

idea of using friends and peers as sounding boards. And here's the truth. I think there is a seat at the table for peers and peer allies to serve on your Advisory Board, but you want to know the limits of their role and usefulness. Peers are essential as people who get it, people who we can commiserate with.

Peers are fantastic for this. You don't want to be going to your mentors or your boss as someone to commiserate with about things that you don't like in your organization. This is where peers are really helpful. I think that expanding and leveraging this group is crucial.

Now the research on this isn't fully written yet, but anecdotally, a gender diverse network of peers can play an important role in amplifying your work. So again, most of us use peer allies as just informal advice and support. I suggest you really cultivate these relationships, especially with peers, in a way that can help you amplify your work. These are the people who can share out the good things that you're doing on LinkedIn or in the team meeting for your cross functional partner teams.

They're the people who will be able to respond to decision makers and say, hey, have you seen so and so's work on this? When someone is asking about who should, who they should call on to spotlight, that's the informal side. And there's also a formal side to this. So I love within the Obama administration, there were several women in the administration who noticed that they were being talked over their ideas.

The credit was not going back to them. They were able to leverage pure allies to get together and say, hey, why don't we amplify each other's work and ideas in a very formal, proactive, premeditated way. And in that way, in meetings where there were several peers together, all dealing with the same frustrations of being talked over, they could amplify each other. Someone would say, hey, did you hear so and so's comment?

I think that's a great idea. We should absolutely do that. This is stuff that you can leverage. The third seat on your Advisory Board should be a sponsor.

It's sometimes confusing to think about the difference between a mentor and a sponsor. So let me break it down for you. Whereas the men, your mentors, it's a two way relationship. Sponsor is also a senior person, sometimes more senior than your mentor, but it's typically a one way relationship where senior person in a position of power really extends their influence and credibility to open professional doors for you.

What's challenging with sponsorship is that you do not get to choose sponsors. Sponsors choose you. These relationships typically don't develop overnight, they're built over time, experience, and proximity. And because these relationships are structured this way, they can be incredibly important and also a bit intimidating because sponsors can make or break a career.

These are the people who are advocating for you behind closed doors, fighting for your raise, your promotion, your inclusion on an important assignment. And sometimes we may not even know who some of our sponsors are. I remember a case early on in my career where I only knew that a senior person was a sponsor because my boss at the time said, hey, you should stay close to this person, They think very highly of your work and have said that in some important meetings. Right.

Otherwise I would have had no idea. The person wasn't taking me out for lunch or giving me advice. She just quietly had an eye on what I was doing, recognized my talent and potential, and advocated for it at moments where it mattered. So sponsorship, this is the thing that is the focus of so much so much research in the management literature because for a long time women were told get a mentor, get a mentor, get a mentor.

And then people are like, Oh no, really what helps or hinders is having sponsorship. That is the critical thing, especially for women. And again, because this is not the kind of relationship that you can open someone's door, walk in and ask for it, many women don't realize how important these relationships are. They don't even sometimes know that they're happening.

So learning to manage your sponsors effectively and not make them our work parent, not make not try to have a mentor relationship with them, but learning to manage them effectively is important. Probably aren't going to get as much time with a sponsor. They tend to be more senior. They may not have as close a relationship with you.

And again, that relationship does tend to be more one way. But you can cultivate those relationships by making yourself visible, creating opportunities to showcase your work. And sometimes, if you're lucky, you'll get some blocks of time with these people, whether it's lunch or coffee or even an elevator ride. So you can make those moments count if you're prepared and if you're leveraging your sponsors well.

And the fourth seat on your Advisory Board, I recommend that everyone work with a coach or a therapist now I'm biased here. I think everyone needs a coach. I think coaches are super powerful or at a minimum, working with a therapist. The role of your coach is to identify blind spots and help you work through them in a smart, strategic way.

And with a coach, they may not be directly in your workplace or industry or field. That's not their role. The role of a coach is someone with whom you can be totally honest, with whom you can let down your guard and tell them how you really feel about what's going on at work and know that your coach is your cheerleader, but is going to tell you when you're sabotaging yourself and call you out on it. For example, I had a client who kept avoiding working on a really big career making presentation.

Every week would come in and hadn't made time to work on the presentation. And at a

certain point I had to call her on that and say, wait, it seems like you are avoiding this task, What's going on here? And some of the stuff that that comes out is not stuff that you necessarily want to put on the plate of a peer or a mentor for that matter. So having someone who is totally outside of your workplace and totally in your corner is essential.

So we talked about four different roles and each of those roles are different. Each of them are complementary. Your peer allies really there for informal advice and support, but also to help amplify your work. Mentors can provide a formal sounding board and also help promote your work.

Sponsors one way relationship to promote you for professional opportunities in your current organization or an outside organization and a coach or a therapist to help identify blind spots and work through them. When you have these 4 roles on your Advisory Board, then you have the most critical supports that you need to see professional opportunities and threats from different angles, to assess them, and to decide thoughtfully and strategically how you want to move forward. I invite you today to think about who you're currently tapping for advice and what seats you need to fill on your Advisory Board to help level up your career. If you're looking for better balance, you have to learn to create boundaries with your time.

I teach you how in my free mini class. This class was designed for busy working moms, so it's only 15 minutes long, but it is packed with amazing strategies that you can use today. So go get the class at www.thementaloffload.com slash TMO mini. That's www.thementaloffload.com/T.

That's T as in the M as in mental, O as in offload mini all one word. When you have time boundaries, you save time, feel more relaxed, and you're able to start creating the balance you want in life. Go get the time boundaries mini class now. Music.