Million Women Mentors: Critical Career Inflection Points: Lessons & Advice
This webinar focused on how to grow as a leader when encountering changes that can be step growth opportunities. By step growth opportunities, we mean they require us to gain and/or refine different skillsets than those that we have leveraged to get to this point in our career. We call those inflection points.
Carolyn Alessi, State Leader for MWM-CT and Regional Director, Community Health and Well Being at Trinity Health Of New England, kicked off the conversation by sharing: “The topic of today’s webinar was inspired by feedback I received from my colleague who turned into my boss that I moved too fast, I realized I needed to figure out how to make my new boss feel comfortable with my decision-making process or this could be a career killer.” And so began the important discussion around career inflection points as leaders.
This timely webinar was moderated by MWM-CT Mentoring Up Advisory Group Member Ron Utterbeck, Senior Vice President and CIO of Eversource where panelists discussed topics like: How do you transition from being an individual contributor to a leader? How do you support a new leader that does things differently than the former leader?
Additional panelists included:
- Torod Neptune, SVP Corporate Marketing, Brand, and Communications & Chief Communications Officer at Medtronic PLC,
- Hope Utterbeck, EVP Chief Information Officer at Liberty Bank,
- Sue Cadieux, Director of Application Work & Asset Management, Field Mobility, Technology Services & Solution & Enterprise Architecture at Eversource
Highlights from the conversation included:
Ron Utterbeck commented, “when we move up as leaders, we need to ask ourselves, as my role changes, do my mentors need to change?”
Torod Neptune shared “As an aspiring manager, I was fairly focused on picking a couple of leaders who I respected how they showed up and who I wanted to emulate their style to ask them to mentor me as a new manager.”
Hope Utterbeck noted “the sessions with your mentor will be as valuable as what you put into it so come prepared.”
Sue Cadieux shared “I sought out mentoring from those who were not in my industry because you can grow and learn in different ways as a leader and human.”
The panelists then gave specific career stage advice for successful mentoring with a goal of “mentoring up” and how to continue to develop as a leader despite experiencing failure as a leader.
Torod Neptune stated “every failure is an opportunity to learn, if you go at it with that, it can benefit your career rather than make you feel defeated and allow that failure to define you.”
Hope Utterbeck advised, “don’t be afraid to fail, because you will never forget what you have learned.”
Sue Cadieux shared “I tell my team, I’m ok with failure but if it happens two or three times then we need to take a step back and figure out what you need to learn or haven’t learned. This is also a good opportunity to engage your mentor to get the support you need to course correct."
