In Your Quest For Success, It May Be Necessary To Move Beyond Mentoring, Recruit An Advisory Board And Chart Your…Career By Committee
Mention the name Martha Stewart, and what comes to mind? A wildly successful entrepreneur and style-setter? A perfection-monger with unrealistic standards for athome entertaining? Or the woman sprawled on the bottom of an empty pool, cutting up credit cards in an American Express commercial?
Opinions aside, there’s no denying that Martha Stewart has used considerable savvy to market herself through her books, magazine and syndicated TV show.
But a recent Working Woman magazine story revealed that Stewart sought help to negotiate a lucrative alliance with Time Inc. She consulted three experts - Charlotte Beers, chair and chief executive of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide; Allen Grubman, an entertainment lawyer; and management consultant Sharon Patrick. They taught her how to be more persuasive, encouraged her to draft a vision statement and showed her how to negotiate.
In the end, Time Inc. and Stewart entered a partnership to create the multimedia Martha Stewart Living Enterprises.
Experts say an advisory board approach such as Stewart’s is gaining ground as a smart success strategy.
“Advisory boards give you the benefit of multiple perspectives,” says Betsy Jaffe, New York Citybased author of “Altered Ambitions: What’s Next in Your Life?” (Donald I. Fine).
“The old mentor model is based on the ‘one job for life and career ladder model,”’ says Arlene Hirsch, author of “The Wall Street Journal’s Premier Guide to Interviewing” (John Wiley). “Since you don’t spend your career at one company anymore, it’s unrealistic to have one mentor who can be all things to you.”
However, an advisory board isn’t a dial-a-career-doctor service. You don’t pester them every week with job problems. Instead, you consult them when you need specific advice about an area with which you are unfamiliar or when you are confronting tough decisions, such as whether to switch jobs or launch a business.
You’ll find potential board members in colleagues, friends, managers or industry leaders. Jaffe recommends selecting a coed group of five to offer analytic strength, financial expertise, creativity, communication skills and a track record in your area.
Vicki Spina did just that when she opened Corporate Image, a career consulting firm in Schaumburg, Ill. Over 18 months she recruited a diverse group that includes a stockbroker, an author, an image consultant, a sales manager and a customer-service representative.
“My advisers give me information and advice that I normally wouldn’t have access to or wouldn’t know how to get,” says Spina, author of “Getting Hired in the ‘90s” (Dearborn Financial Publishing). xxxx GETTING ON BOARD Tips to setting up a personal advisory board: Focus on what you hope to achieve. Tap your network. Ask contacts to refer you to others. Interview and get to know prospective advisers, and invite them to be on your panel. Shift your mind-set. Realize you’ll need different advisers for different aspects of your career. Anticipate change. Your advisory board will evolve as you grow. Be on the lookout for new people.