We've been talking in this course about you becoming a leader.
We hope that you are thinking about and practicing being
the very best leader that you can become on your own journey to leadership.
There's a lot we haven't covered in this course.
And as you continue to grow as a leader,
as you continue to move forward building your professional IQ,
adding to that backpack of professional skills that Robin Miller talked about,
think about how you can keep learning and growing.
Read. Find articles, find books,
look at talks online, find resources.
There are any number of topics that can be extremely helpful to learn about.
Change Management is a topic in which there's a rich literature.
Some of it stronger than others and all of it full of ideas that
you may want to consider and adapt and see which ones work for you and which ones don't.
Managing your time, management, leadership, globalization,
cultural differences, communication, negotiation,
there are a lot of resources.
Network, use your network.
Do some research.
Find things that interest you.
Read them, share them with others,
discuss them, keep growing.
Self-assess and set goals and
use some of the skills we've talked about for assessing how you're doing,
keeping metrics and continuing to improve.
Are you getting where you want to get?
Stop and reflect every now and then.
Look at your personal leadership credo.
Revise it. Set yourself some new goals.
Our experts had so much to say about
this topic that we've tried to leave some room for them to have the last word on it.
I'm really looking for someone who
has a ton of curiosity and is very eager to learn.
So, that is extremely important because learning
on the job and working with our clients is really key.
We really want you to have some foundational skills
when you come in we know you can perform,
but ongoing curiosity is key.
You know I'm looking for people who have drive and curiosity to learn
more and individuals who are not happy with the status quo.
No matter what, things can always be improved.
And so when I work with team members who have
that curiosity who want to do more and take on more and take
on areas of responsibility that are
outside their current focus or area of responsibility.
I mean one of the main things we do is give them more responsibility.
And so it's giving exposure to new opportunities.
You know, acting as a key mentor is very important and basically pushing them to say,
"Where do you see yourself in five years?"
A lot of individuals are looking at a year or two ahead.
It's very difficult to think about five years.
But time goes by so quickly.
If you want to achieve certain things you need to have that five-year plan,
and your coach or your mentor can really help you achieve that
and think through what experiences do you need to get there.
And I'd say having that thoughtful approach of where you want to move in
your career and making sure your coach and others are
helping you achieve that is probably the most important thing we can do There's
individuals who I think maybe
sometimes think they can move faster than they really should.
And part of the feedback process is
giving honest feedback and making sure you're building
a strong foundation of skills so as you
progress in your career you actually have a strong foundation.
It's very easy sometimes to move a few steps
forward and skip over some foundational key skills.
However, they will ultimately catch up to you So,
it's our job to make sure we're giving all of our employees that
rounded full experience so that they're successful going forward.
It's much worse in your career to take
a few steps forward and then get held up and move back.
When we talked about our brand,
how that would hurt someone's brand versus someone who's moving
up continuously and steadily and always successful.
That successful brand sticks around and therefore
sometimes trying to jump ahead too quickly is not the best thing for your career.
I think some of the things that we go through
is the specialization of our jobs,
being in a general practice area and then becoming more specific to that practice.
And I think that going forward,
employees and students, whoever,
are going to find that in the workplace they're going to have to be more
specific in their knowledge.
So, I'm a lifelong student
continuing to be certified and updating my educational levels to know what's going on.
And of course with the benefit area,
those things change hourly and the regs,
the guidelines with the Affordable Care Act and the insurance premiums and
all those kind of things are changing so much in our environment.
So, that requires me to be involved in a lot of sessions and learning and
education pieces belonging to national organizations to get that information.
And I also think with the professional learning comes with my day to day.
Lots of different positions,
even here at the U of I Community Credit Union in the last 15 years I've had
an opportunity to do a lot of different jobs and have
the flexibility to be able to do that.
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C. K. GunsalusDirector of the National Center for Professional and Research Ethics (NCPRE), Professor Emerita of Business, and Research Professor at the Coordinated Science Laboratory
