BELAY Solutions is one of my favorite organizations. Co-founded by Bryan Miles and his wife Shannon, BELAY was recently ranked #1 among small companies in the 2017 Top Company Cultures List Presented by Entrepreneur and CultureIQ.
Originally called eaHELP, they expanded the horizons of their Virtual Assistant service model to include MAG Bookkeeping, copywriting services, and web support services. In January 2017, the Miles Advisory Group suite (eaHELP, MAG Bookkeeping, Render and Ellipsis) came together under one name – BELAY. This name has a great deal of significance to our leaders because of its core meaning: To belay is to provide the support a climber needs to ascend.
Bryan and Shannon are two of America’s most influential business leaders. In fact, if you have not gotten Shannon’s new book The Third Option: Why a Woman Doesn’t Have to Choose between a Career and Family, but Can Actually Have Both and Succeed, click HERE. You will not be disappointed.
Below is a LinkedIn article written by her originally entitled Harnessing The Power Of Mentorship To Grow Your Career Options. The content is so important I want to make it available to you. She gives some incredible insights into how she found quality mentors in her life.
After reading, if you are considering a virtual assistant, click HERE and start a conversation today.
Now onto Shannon’s comments:
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Mentors are essential. Without them, it’s far harder to accomplish professional successes. This is particularly true when you’re contemplating moves that go beyond the standard career path—a zone I describe as The Third Option. I’ve learned an enormous amount from the support and advice of some incredible female mentors. Without them, the road to my Third Option would have been both lonelier and more stressful.
Judi was my first boss at McKesson. She led the contracts department. She always saw more potential in me than I saw in myself, and I’ve taken that philosophy through to my own leadership style. In fact, that’s how I became an assistant manager. I was the youngest in our group and managing people twice my age, and I was crazy intimidated. I felt as though I had no business leading people. I needed the extra boost of confidence that Judi provided.
She invested in me, she was willing to have the tough conversations when necessary, but she was also extremely encouraging. She helped me find my vision, a way of looking at who I could be and what I could be doing, and that gave me the confidence to take on more—probably more than I had any business taking on. I look back now and realize how many managerial mistakes I made in those years, but she helped me learn from all of them.
In sales, I made a point of looking around to see who was doing what I wanted to be doing. I went to Joanne because she was a kick-butt salesperson. Always made her quota. Supercool. Clients loved her. She was fun and easy to work with, and got a ton of stuff done. I looked at Joanne and thought, That’s who I want to be when I grow up.
I asked her to mentor me, and she said yes. I could call her anytime I was in a situation I couldn’t figure out, and we had regular meetings as well. When she saw teachable moments, she’d bring them up. Sometimes she’d call me and just ask, “Hey, how’s it going? What are you working on? How can I help you?” That gave me so much comfort, knowing that even though at times I was in way over my head, I wasn’t alone. I had people I could lean on to help me navigate problems and to help me grow.
Then came my transition from sales into project management—my part-time Third Option position—and that’s when I reported to Saadet, who led me through true ownership of the role. I was the only part-time person on a team of about forty people. Saadet had a ridiculous number of direct reports, but she never made me feel less important than anyone else because I was part-time.
She always held me to the same standard as everybody else but was encouraging at the same time. She was a mother herself, so she knew firsthand some of the challenges life can throw at you. She gave me some incredible gifts, but perhaps the most important was her reaction to my calls.
When I went to her with a problem, she would say, “Is this something you want me to help you solve, or are you just looking for me to listen?” I thought, That is wise and so applicable. Fifteen years later, I use that same question all the time with my employees. Sometimes you just need somebody to talk to about something, as a way to verbally process the situation. That person doesn’t have to be the one to fix it for you. Saadet said, “I can help you if you need me to, but if you just need me to listen, or you’re just calling me to vent, that’s fine, too. Just tell me which way you want to go.” That’s brilliant!
The final mentor I’m grateful to is a woman named Lisa, who was also a kick-butt salesperson. This was a woman who had a great deal of credibility in the organization. One day, completely out of the blue, she called Mark—the manager who eventually agreed to my part-time Third Option—and said, “Hey, Mark. I know Shannon is new in sales. I just wanted to let you know she’s a good woman. She’s going to do great things. Just be on the lookout for her.” I was blown away. Who does something like that? I think that call led to my credibility with Mark when I later approached him and said, “I want to go part-time, and this baby wrecked me.”
Having a mentor is essential for The Third Option. It is not just about climbing the ladder. Once you start down your road, you find more and more people who listen and offer advice. Mentors are an important part of my story, and I hope every young professional has the opportunity, or makes the opportunity, to engage mentors with their best interests at heart.
You may ask yourself who you know that may be willing to act as a mentor for you. Who in your life, or within reach, models some of the qualities you need to make a success of your Third Option? Reach out to them and request mentorship today! You may save yourself needless pain and confusion by doing so and—in the process—make a friend for life.