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October  2009
Announcing Careerology.ca
 
Over the past 6 months, we have been developing a new and radically different career site. We realized that other career sites are task focused and we wanted more for our clients. Other sites help build your resume, offer networking tips and link to job boards. Careerology™ offers a different way for achieving your career dreams and aspirations. With our experience in working with hundreds of individuals in leadership coaching, Kolbe Index and Enneagram personality combined with years of using our proprietary methods including the Authentic Leadership model, and the Best-Half we see an opportunity for a comprehensive career development site that helps people build and manage their successful career from the "inside out."
 
Careerology benefits both employers and employees:
 
Careerology curriculum leads people on a path of personal discovery at their own pace in their own environment, to determine what matters to them and what possibilities excite and provide fulfillment, meaning and prosperity.
 
Careerology helps to translate this information into concrete action steps.
 
The Careerology Manager's Guide™ increases the confidence of the manager to conduct a successful career dialogue with the employee by providing them with a set of leadership coaching questions, walking the manager step-by-step through a successful career dialogue.
 
Careerology provides tools and strategies for the employee for understanding their career motivations, what truly matters to them, possibilities for their future and how to get prepared and organized for their career dialogue.
 
After completing the 16 exercises in Careerology the employee has a greater understanding of how to successfully manage their career. They have clarity and certainty on what is important in their career. The clarity and certainty coupled with their career dialogue leads to sustainable career results, commitment and achieving their career aspirations. A multi-page Careerology portfolio which provides a written record of the employee's responses provides a continuing record and a template for their current and future career dialogues or for planning their own career strategies.
 
We believe that Careerology will transform the way that employees feel about their career journey offering them an interactive process where they feel engaged, excited, and committed to their career. Careerology offers the managers a consistent and helpful approach to conducting career dialogues in organizations. Using Careerology transforms career dialogue opportunities into welcomed and anticipated experiences for both the employer and the employee providing shared understanding and clear and direct outcomes for an exciting future full of abundance and gratitude.

We are grateful to our clients who continue to help us add value to their organizations. One way we currently add this value is through the Best-Half Process. The Best-Half has been very successful helping individuals gain clarity and certainty in creating and living their legacy everyday. It is also a successful tool for dialogue between employees and managers. We have seen over and over, when working with our clients that real change and leadership although often driven in response to an external event, actually happens from within. This philosophy is carried through with Careerology.
 
Please look forward to the Careerology.ca launch at the end of November.

Tis the Season for Transitions
 
We can all count on one thing as Canadians; seasonal weather changes come and go around the same time give or take a couple of weeks depending on where you live in this great country of ours. It's a cold October day here and I am getting out my fall coat. I like the change to autumn from summer. There is a sense of anticipatory achievement that comes with the change from summer. I suspect we each have our rituals and check lists going into a change of seasons. This month is Bring in pots from outside Check. Drain pond Check. Cover up the sports car, Check. We need to transition into the new season gradually to get everything done and get it right. Blame it on the variability of the temperature and the tasks that need to be performed. No point in emptying pots if there is no frost yet.
 
Getting ready for the change in seasons got me thinking... Transitions need to be gradual for a number of reasons. We need to think about what needs to be done. We need to gauge the speed of the transition and we need to determine if the transition is complete and successful.
 
Michael Watkins who wrote The First 90 Days, published in 2003, recently wrote in Chief Learning Officer about the Eight Toughest Transitions for Managers. He describes four general principles for adapting in order to successfully manage the transitions we come up against. He calls this your Personal Adaptive Challenge (PAC).
The four drivers of your personal adaptive challenge are:
  • Enhancing self-awareness
  • Exercising personal discipline
  • Building complementary teams
  • Leveraging advice-and-counsel networks
Enhancing self-awareness: It's essential that you understand yourself and how you instinctively manage transitions. How do you learn? When do you take action?   What is your risk tolerance? How do you prefer to make decisions? The Kolbe Index Assessment gives a clear, easy to understand picture of who you are and how you take action in any situation including change and transition. Over 500 of our clients have told us in their Kolbe Index discussions that it is an "amazingly accurate, valuable and validating" reflection of who they are.

Exercising personal discipline: You need to adapt yourself to the demands of the new role and not vice versa. Saying you are going to lead to change the world or at least your small piece of it means having to come to the realization that you can't do it all. Successful "transitioners" focus on what they are very, very good at and determine what needs to be delegated. I'm good at draining my pond however digging it and building it was delegated to my teenage son and his friends looking for something to do one hot summer day a long time ago now.

Building complementary teams: If you can't do it all, beware the lure of selecting clones and creating your own "personal echo chamber" as Wilson refers to it. Build a team that supports your skills and allows everyone else the freedom to act their best by bringing synergy to the team. Team synergy is vital for success of any transition. We have used Kolbe Team Synergy with over fifty teams to increase their team synergy and make decisions on who is best instinctively driven to do what task. The results are phenomenal and everyone is happier too.

Leveraging advice-and-counsel networks: Finally, check in with your networks, coach or advisory board. Check to make sure that this is the network that will propel you forward at this time and in this place. Maybe its time for some new perspective.  These can be both insiders and externals. Look to people that have achieved both an inside and external perspective. Their insights can be especially valuable. As authentic leaders we have our own leadership coaches so we can continue to be leaders in all parts of our life and therefore continue to give our wisdom and experience to our clients. Look to world leaders who are in the news everyday for direction on authenticity. Obama has a close group of long time diverse advisers whom he trusts and know him for who he is. They are people who keep him grounded while expanding his perspective. 
 
Transitions are a given. Managing your own responses to the many transitions we all experience everyday will go a long way to smoothing the journey for those looking to you for leadership, inspiration, motivation, advice, and direction. I learned how to manage my responses to transitions as a University of Winnipeg student when I couldn't find my mittens. I tried to keep my cool, look for them, not worry about frostbite, look again and ask for help. If still no luck then I had some choices: stimulate the economy and buy a new pair or get my mother to sew strings on them. As a poor university student I choose the latter and I was grateful that my mom always did a great job of sewing on those strings. Excellent conversation starter too!
Who We Are...At the heart of it, we are helpful. Our clients are busy, successful, smart and curious. We approach any relationship with a sense of gratitude, generosity and respect. We like to have fun. Our work is about uncovering our client's perspective and creating certainty, expanding and discovering creativity and possibility and above all taking action.
We understand and are experts in change from a theoretical and a practical basis. We know the value of engagement, communication and the importance of creating a sense of confidence. We are certified and accredited professionals in our specialties.
We provide all of the human development side of strategic HR. We help hire the right people. We work with teams including boards of directors so they can become more effective and more efficient. For organizations, we assist in transforming their culture. We coach leaders; sometimes with our proprietary process called The Best-Half™ and our Authentic Leadership Model©. Organizations looking to develop or implement strategic plans have us on speed-dial. Many of our clients have said "we are nice people to work with."