Logo courtesy of Xavier Leadership Center
We are honored to have been apart of the Xavier Leadership Center’s inaugural cohort of the Women’s Business Leadership Certificate program. The program is a 10 month intensive covering a wide variety of topics, ours being a focus on Mentorship For Leaders.
Mentorship, for mentors and mentees alike, builds essential leadership skills: empathy, active listening, communication, and managing up to name a few. Like all relationships, each person involved must establish and communicate their expectations of one another and themselves in order for the mentoring relationship to succeed. As we develop as leaders in our careers, our definition of success with mentors shifts, as do our needs. It becomes increasingly apparent that we cannot have all of our mentorship needs met with one individual, but rather, that we need to seek out a multitude of personal mentoring relationships.
Our focus for the day was establishing a personal board of directors, which starts with understanding our individual areas of strength and opportunity. From there, we can define who we need sitting at our table that can push us in our areas of strength and support us in our areas of opportunity. By building an understanding of the specific roles that mentors, coaches, and sponsors can fill, we can map out the ideal team to push us to the next level as leaders.
The attendees at the XLC session left with a complete map of next steps to find their ideal teams, and we know are being pushed to that next level.
Women working hard during group discussion.