A few weeks ago I was clearing out my apartment, and came across a sheet of paper with a list of 10 items written on it. The list detailed 10 goals I had set for myself to achieve, both in my working life and personal life. I went through each item and ticked every single one. I traced back the steps I had taken to reach these goals, and remembered that it had all started in my initial planning session with WoW.
WoW is a network of female executives that are committed to supporting the next generation of working women to achieve their career potential. At WoW, they believe that it is the absence of confidence, not ability that can act as a barrier for women from advancing to more senior roles.
At the start of 2016, I joined 26 other women as a mentee in WoW’s inaugural programme. The programme is run by a steering committee of top Irish businesswomen who are passionate about helping younger women overcome some of the barriers they have faced in their own careers.
The WoW Steering Group consists of Florence Stanley (Executive Director and Head of Retail at CBRE), Carol Bolger (Chartered Director and an assessor of boards with the Institute of Directors in Ireland), Aileen O’Toole (Digital Strategist and a Chartered Director who sits on the boards of the Road Safety Authority and of Business in the Community) Clodagh Hughes (CEO of Motive8, an organisational development consultancy that specialises in top team and senior leadership performance) and Patricia Doherty (a consultant in strategy, leadership and governance in the public and private sectors).
They came together and devised a programme that would help mentees achieve a step change in their careers in just one year. The course was designed from best practise derived from local and international training courses, studies surrounding the development of women in the workplace and behavioural attitudes that might hold women back.
We were to make a commitment to achieve a step-change in our career within the year. Then we mapped out the actions needed to achieve these goals in an in-depth goal setting workshop. The session was hugely valuable to me, a little like setting out a ‘to do’ list for the year ahead. This system is taken from a well-known international programme called Best Year Yet, which helps people achieve breakthroughs in both their performance and their behaviour.
Throughout the year, we met every month to be trained in areas that we had expressed a lack of confidence in, including:
- Presenting with confidence
- Your personal brand
- Networking skills
- Confidence building
Alongside regular training, we were assigned a mentor from outside our own workplace, and a sponsor within our workplace. According to international studies on career development, workers that have a mentor coupled with a sponsor have a much stronger support system and therefore a much stronger chance of achieving their goals. And this definitely worked for me. I met with both to discuss everything from trivial day-to-day issues to bigger challenges that at the time I felt would be impossible to solve. During my conversations with both, I was able to gain a different perspective and solution-driven approach from highly capable and experienced women.
I have achieved the planned step change in my career, I now approach my work in a completely different style and am more conscious of behavioural attitudes that might have set me back in the past. The course has opened my eyes to the fact that everyone needs support & proper training in the workplace and with the right support, anyone can tick that list of 10 goals off in no time.
