Who should have a personal board of directors?

You need a personal board of directors if you are an entrepreneur, a leader, or a professional who wants to grow and succeed in your career. A personal board of directors is a group of people who can offer you guidance, support, and advice on various aspects of your work and life. Talking with friends and family members about your work can be helpful, but depending on their background and experience, they might be unable to give you the perspective and guidance needed to achieve your goals. This is especially true if you come from a blue-collar background where the rules for getting ahead differ from most white-collar jobs. In addition to your current network, it is helpful to identify peers, mentors, coaches, experts, and role models to help you better understand how to succeed in a business environment where business acumen, strategic planning, and networking are necessary for advancing your career.

Like a company board of directors, a personal board of directors aims to provide the guidance and support you need to fulfill your career goals. The knowledge and skills you have developed to this point of your career have gotten you to where you are, but to move to the next level, you will need to develop new skills, habits, and behaviors. Your current mindset might be getting in the way of letting go of tasks others could do, investing in your business, and making time for self-care. Changing your mindset is crucial as you move into senior-level roles within an organization or work on scaling your business. Having a routine of discussing current business challenges with a trusted group of advisors can help you reduce the feeling of being alone. The group can help you to

• Gain new knowledge and skills you may not learn from your formal education or training.

• Get valuable feedback and constructive criticism from people who can challenge and push you out of your comfort zone.

• Be persistent when you face difficulties or failures.

• Identify partnership opportunities and expand your network with potential collaborators, clients, investors, or mentors.

• Receive opportunities for career development or business expansion.

Who's your support?

• Friends
• Family
• Employees
• Peers

See All Options

You can vote for more than one answer.

There are four steps that you should follow when forming your personal board of directors.

Clearly define your professional goals.

Depending on your goals, the people that should be on your board of directors will change. For example, if you want to become a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), having someone on your board who understands marketing at a high level would be beneficial. It would also be helpful to have someone that is a Senior Executive that understands what it takes to reach the highest levels of leadership within an organization.

Define the type of people you want on your board.

Diversity is paramount. Your intent should be to have a wide range of people from different backgrounds, races, genders, and specialties. Model your personal board after companies like Apple. Apple's board of directors includes:

• Tim Cook, CEO of Apple

• Arthur Levison, Founder, and CEO of Calico,

• James A. Bell, CFO and Corporate President at Boeing Company,

• Former Vice President Al Gore

• Alex Gorsky, Former Executive Chair of Johnson and Johnson

• Andrea Jung, President and CEO of Grameen America

• Monica Lazano, Former President and CEO of the College Futures Foundation

• Ronald Sugar, Former Chair and CEO of Northrop Grumman

• Susan L. Wagner. Co-founder and Director BlackRock

By having people from different industries, genders, and backgrounds, Apple benefits from the diverse knowledge, skills, and perspectives of the people on its board. You might not be able to attract such big names. Still, you can intentionally seek and build meaningful relationships with diverse groups of people that can advise you on growing your career or business.

Define how you will engage with your board.

Determining the frequency and manner of touching base can help you ensure that you are leveraging your board optimally. One of the benefits of having a board is that you are not dependent on one person for everything. By having multiple people whom you consult, you reduce the burden on any one person and limit the chances of burning out a relationship. Initially, meeting with board members one on one may make sense, but over time it can benefit you to introduce your board members to each other and participate in group discussions.

Show gratitude.

The sacrist resource that we have is time. When people take time out of their schedule to support you, show them some love. Communicating gratitude can manifest itself in many ways. One of the best ways is to provide people with updates on the progress that you have made based on their feedback. When you earn a win because of guidance or help from a board member, let them know. They will likely see your wins as their wins. They invest time in you because they believe in your potential and want to see you succeed. Pay them back by letting them know about their positive impact on your career or business.

Humans are a tribal species. We thrive in communities. As you look to progress your career or business, seek out a tribe that can help you grow into the person your potential. We are the summation of our experiences. The more time you can dedicate to learning from people that know things you do not know, the better prepared you will be for the new challenges. You do not have to figure things out alone. Expand your network, seek out mentors, and hire professionals that can help you achieve your goal.

---

Thank you for reading this blog

Dorian Cunion is an Executive Business Coach with Your Path Coaching and Consulting. He is a former retail executive with over 20 years of experience in the retail industry. He is a Co-Active coach who focuses on helping professionals and small business owners overcome insecurities, knowledge gaps, and lack of direction. He does this by helping clients tap into their values, recognize their strengths, and develop actionable strategies for growth.

Have you been trying to improve your career or business on your own but are not seeing success as fast as you desire?

Book a free discovery call where we can discuss your goals and how I can help you accelerate.

Talk with Dorian

Have Feedback? Send me a note at

Email: dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com

For daily tips on leadership and professional development, follow me:

LinkedIn

Facebook

5 Tips to Help Managers Improve Employee Motivation

The key to effectively running a profitable business is motivating employees to perform their roles at a high level. For your employees to perform at their best, they must be intrinsically motivated. Intrinsic motivation comes from understanding who they are, who they want to be, and how their current role can help them close the gap. Finding intrinsic motivation is a deeply personal process. Still, it can be assisted by taking the time to understand your employees' goals and help them see how their goals can be accomplished within your organization. By helping employees identify how their work connects to your company vision, you can create higher levels of commitment and personal accountability.

Higher levels of commitment and accountability will lead to employees working harder to accomplish company objectives because they understand how their success is linked to yours. Former MLB Coach Yoga Berra once said, "If you know where you're going, it's a lot easier to get there." This is as true in business as it is in baseball. When you help your employees develop a clear vision of where your company is going and the benefit they will receive from excelling at their role, you create an environment where employees want to thrive because they know they will win, as the company wins.

Be Clear on the Company's Mission and Vision.

The first step is ensuring employees understand your business's vision and mission. This understanding needs to be clear, aspirational, and values-based. You might feel that vision and mission statements as empty words that do not provide much value to the day-to-day operations of a business. This could not be further from the truth. Vision Statements offer employees a picture of what a company wants to be. At the same time, a mission statement details why the work that is being done is essential. When you provide your employees with the what and the why of the company's existence, they can better find purpose in their work within the company.

Employees' commitment and motivation are highest when their passion and purpose align with the company's needs. By consistently communicating the company's vision and mission statement, you can help employees understand how central both are to everything the company does. This lays the foundation for the employee to connect the dots between their role and the company's overall success.

Gain Commitment.

Once you have helped employees understand the company's vision and mission, your next job is to gain employees' commitment to their role within the organization. Gaining employees' commitment transfers the burden of accountability from you to the employee. When employees are committed to doing a job, they are more likely to show initiative, seek help, and require less follow-up from you. Gaining commitment is essential because commitment is the foundation for accountability. Accountability is an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one's actions. If you establish a safe and candid work environment with your employees, they will only commit to things they believe they can accomplish. By soliciting commitments from your employees, you gain awareness of the employee's belief in their ability to complete a task and their word to put their best effort into achieving it.

Secure Resources.

After gaining commitment, you should seek to understand what resources employees need to complete the task. If the employees are going to complete the task for the first time, the help they need might be coaching or training. You should work with the employees to identify the resources required to complete the job. Aligning the amount of time, money, materials, technology, people, or other resources upfront can prevent future frustration, conflict, and delays. By identifying and securing the resources necessary to complete the task upfront, you can better position the employee for success.

Monitor Performance.

You and your employees must establish a routine for discussing employee satisfaction and performance. By defining periodic moments to pause and review actions and results, both parties have certainty that they will be able to discuss

• How is the employee performing compared to expectations?

• How does the employee's current work align with their personal goals?

• What additional training or support does the employee need?

• If any changes need to be made to current roles or responsibilities?

• Ways to improve communication, partnership, and collaboration between employees and other stakeholders associated with the company.

During these meetings, you and the employee should review previous commitments to ensure that both parties follow through on the previously communicated actions. If either party fails to meet prior commitments, a resolution should be found to adjust expectations or provide additional resources or support.

2-Way Feedback.

During the progress check-ins, you and the employee should have the opportunity to provide each other with feedback. Check-in meetings should be more than you communicating expectations and providing feedback. Employees should have time to voice concerns or give feedback on work conditions, goals, organizational culture, and management practices. Encouraging employees to be candid about their wants and needs can help to strengthen relationships and remove leadership blind spots. By providing a space for employees to voice their thoughts and concerns, you can better understand what might be getting in the way of their productivity. With this information, you can better support employees in finding solutions that help them and the company perform at higher levels.

Summary

Employees join companies to satisfy their wants and needs. You can help employees identify how their wants and needs can be fulfilled through work. This will create higher levels of loyalty and commitment. Committed employees will do everything within their power to support the success of an organization. To improve your employees' productivity and effectiveness, start by understanding why they're working for you. Then, help them see how their commitment to bringing the company's vision and mission to life will bring them closer to achieving their goals.

---

Thank you for reading this blog

Dorian Cunion is an Executive Business Coach with Your Path Coaching and Consulting. He is a former retail executive with over 20 years of experience in the retail industry. He is a Co-Active coach who focuses on helping professionals and small business owners overcome insecurities, knowledge gaps, and lack of direction. He does this by helping clients tap into their values, recognize their strengths, and develop actionable strategies for growth.

Have you been trying to improve your career or business on your own but are not seeing success as fast as you desire?

Book a free discovery call where we can discuss your goals and how I can help you accelerate.

Talk with Dorian

Have Feedback? Send me a note at

Email: dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com

For daily tips on leadership and professional development, follow me:

LinkedIn

Facebook

Improve your Team Culture with this 15-minute routine.

Improving team culture is a challenge that is universal to all leaders. At their roots, teams work best with a shared purpose, good communication, and collaboration. Like a rowing team, everyone must have a cadence for working together and rowing in the same direction. One of the primary roles of a leader is to bring talented people together, create that cadence, provide guidance, and help them to achieve more together than they could apart. Implementing Recognition, Obstacle, and Win (ROW) meetings can help leaders achieve these goals. ROW meetings improve communication, encourage recognition and bring visibility to obstacles in a time-efficient and effective way.

ROW meetings are about developing a cadence for communicating the good and bad things happening in a business. These meetings are typically 15 to 20 minutes long. Each participant comes to the meeting prepared with a 2-minute recap of their week. The summary should include recognizing one person for doing a great job, one obstacle they needed help with, and one team win they wanted to celebrate. Since each participant only has 2 minutes, it forces them to be brief and only focus on the highlights. These recaps should mirror the trailer for a movie. The goal is to provide enough information for people to know what is happening in the person's area of responsibility. If anyone attending the meeting is interested in learning more, they can follow up after the meeting with questions or suggestions.

Recognition of Employees

One of the hallmarks of a good culture is recognition. Adam Grant and Francesa Gino's research has shown that expressions of gratitude can help build employees' self-efficacy and social worth, motivating them to engage in prosocial behavior. Thanking employees for a job well done is one of the best ways to improve a team's culture. Employees go to work every day, doing their job, and many never hear a thank you from their peers or boss. Organizational culture improves when leaders maintain a process for slowing down, considering the contributions made by those ad them, and expressing gratitude.

A supplemental benefit of this routine is how it supports people in getting to know each other. During group meetings, there is a tendency for some extroverts to dominate conversations and for everyone else to listen. The imbalance of communication can create group thinking and blind spots within a team. The two-minute target for each participant ensures that everyone has an equal opportunity to communicate. More value is generated during the meeting because there is a greater diversity of thought and inclusion of everyone's ideas.

Sharing of Obstacles

Each participant will share one obstacle they needed help solving. Initially, leaders might be uncomfortable voicing challenges if it is different from the norm within the organization. It is common for employees to be private about the barriers preventing their success until they have done everything possible to solve the issue independently. The hesitation to share challenges creates unneeded pressure within organizations and can slow down the removal of obstacles. By individuals being vulnerable in the group setting, other participants that have prior experience with similar obstacles can assist the person in need. In addition, when there is a commonality in challenges, participants can partner together to find solutions.

Obstacles are like weeds that prevent organizations from reaching their full potential. Employees within organizations do their best to pull weeds. Often the process is long and complex because employees need more tools, resources, and power to address complex issues. Managers are essential in getting employees the tools they need to overcome barriers. The ROW meetings provided a cadence for managers to check in with employees. As they inquire about challenges, they can provide tips and guidance for addressing opportunities. If they cannot solve the problem at their level, the manager can bring it to the meeting and seek advice and support from the team.

Celebrating Wins

The final segment of the recap is a review of wins for the week. Celebrating successes is essential for locking in learning. In Whitney Johnson's book Smart Growth, she evangelizes celebration's role in cementing lessons learned and strengthening relationships. Leaders work hard to drive results. Time must be allocated for them to feel the joy of their team's accomplishment. Sharing of wins provides examples of excellence for the broader group. It also creates opportunities for individuals to be more aware of success outside their direct business, which can both motivate and inspire others to greatness.

Talking about team wins during group meetings helps the team focus on the big picture. Most organizations operate in silos. For information to be shared, it has to flow up one silo to the leader and then back down another silo. The multiple communication points can be slow and weaken the benefit of the message. Often this results in team members focusing too much on their silo and not dedicating time or energy to thinking about what is vital for the overall organization. Good teammates care more about winning the game than their individual performance. By celebrating the wins generated across the different teams, the collective group can take pride in the overall organization's progress.

Insights

Weekly meetings can be an excellent way for a leader to do a temperature check with the team. When things are going well, meetings will be super positive, high energy, and upbeat. The organization will feel healthy, similar to a person with a 98 degrees temperature. When the obstacles are growing or when stress rises, the meeting will have a completely different feel. There will be more negativity. People will struggle more with finding and talking about wins. And the group will spend more time discussing obstacles. When this occurs, it will feel like the organization has a fever. Just as you would take an aspirin and get some rest at the first signs of a fever, it will be necessary for the leader to take steps to bring the team's temperature down collectively. The best way to address the tension is to recalibrate goals and verify that project timelines are realistic.

Summary

The ROW meeting approach can effectively establish a culture of recognition, positivity, and accountability within the team. It will ensure that every member of the team speaks during each meeting. It encouraged them to spend 66% of their time talking about positive events in the last week and only 33% of the time on obstacles. It challenges them to prioritize, summarize and be direct with their communications. Recaps will be 2 minutes, so there is not much fluff. Speakers must communicate what is essential and pass the spotlight to the next person.

The call will be engaging because multiple voices will be heard, and the topic of conversation will be focused on the remarkable things that are happening in the business. Team members will find it refreshing to get obstacles brought to the table, and the group will feel a greater sense of cohesion as they discuss ways to solve problems after the calls. Implementing this 15-minute-a-week routine can do a lot to improve the culture of an organization. The practices leaders establish say a lot about who they are and what is essential. Leaders who build routines around recognizing team members, capturing obstacles, and celebrating wins build a strong foundation of trust within their organization. The very trust needed to build a strong culture.

---

Dorian Cunion is an Executive Business Coach with your Path Coaching and Consulting. He specializes in coaching services for managers, executives, and small business owners.

For tips on leadership and professional development, follow me:

• LinkedIn

• Facebook

If you are interested in working with me as a coach, contact me at

• Email: dcunion@yourpathexecutivesolutions.com

• Phone: 804-220-5771

Interested in working with an executive coach?