Wednesday, November 21, 2007

A new word for the workplace dictionary

My boss is one of the most intriguing, intellectually-minded guys I know. He is in fact so intellectual and so witty that I often find myself obsessed with trying to figure out his comments. He uses dry humor that one can only understand if you’ve been in the CIA with some secret language that only you know. When I finally understand what he is saying I want to congratulate myself as if I’ve accomplished a mission to "crack the code" Da Vinci style.

It was one such event the other day when my boss was expressing how livid he was with how another co-worker responded to an external client. The co-worker was so unprofessional and mindless that my boss wanted to, wait here it is, "defenestrate" him. The other team members and I stopped his ranting and said, what? Defenestrate? What does that mean? He said he wanted to throw him out the window. We all rushed to our computers to look it up on dictionary.com and sure enough the word means "to throw out of a window." I love it.

I was suddenly brought back to remembrance of my high school German class and remembered that "Fenster" is the word for window and perhaps is the root of this wonderfully poignant word. That will help me to remember it easier now too.

So if you’ve ever had a moment where you’ve thought of throwing someone out the window I would urge you to use this word and feel happy in knowing that you have verbally acted on it and hopefully befuddled the listener. More additions to the workplace dictionary to come later.

Posted by Melanie Lopez at 15:05:46 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Monday, October 15, 2007

Best thing you can do for your career starts with "me"

One of the greatest pieces of advice I received in college was to develop a relationship with at least one of my professors each semester. This would give me a network of professors that would support me, share advice with me, and (maybe most importantly) be able to write recommendations for me.

The same rule applies to your career, too. If you make the effort to build relationships with mentors you will have greater success both personally and professionally. Here are the tips I recommend:

Build a relationship with at least 2 mentors each year
Logistically, you could start a new mentorship every six months. Some companies help by providing this kind of "service" to their employees to promote career development. Kudos to those that do. If you're at a majority of the companies that don't, you can initiate the mentorship either formally or informally.

Choose mentors outside of your bubble
Your manager is likely some kind of mentor to you, but you would enhance your experience by going outside your comfort zone and meeting with someone you hardly know. Use your manager to get suggestions of persons to mentor with. Find a mentor that works in a field or specialty that interests you but that you may not have experience in. You never know, it might be the catalyst for pursuing a new area.

Starts with "me"
As a mentee the ball is in your court to develop the relationship and think of questions and ideas to discuss. As long as the mentor is okay with it, you can gain valuable insight beyond just the basic job information into things like how to negotiate, where to go on vacation, and how they maintain a work/life balance.

Once you have a network of mentors, you'll find that you get more exposure in the business, become more knowledgeable, and stand out more to your manager.

Posted by Melanie Lopez at 20:54:39 | Permanent Link | Comments (1) |