Career Stewardship with Michael Melcher

There are coaches all around the world.  In this episode, we examine executive coaching and career development from the point of view of someone who practices in a different hemisphere.  Michael speaks with Ana Pliopas, Ph.D, a coach in Brazil who trained at the Hudson Institute, where Michael also did his coach training.  They discuss how the pandemic affected the way people see their careers, the differences and similarities in how pandemic stress showed up in Brazil vs. the United States, and how coaching might show up differently in the two countries.  She also shares what she learned in the course of writing her dissertation on the relationships among clients, organizations and coaches.

Career progress isn't just about how competent or hard-working you are.  It can require the ability to attain and exert power within organizations.  This is a scary thing because power tends to have a bad rap.  You might think you can't attain it, or you might not want to attain it.  As our guest Michael Chang Wenderoth explains, power is simply the ability to get your way in the face of opposition, and it's something that you can understand, unlock and use for your own benefit.  Wenderoth is the author of the new book, Get Promoted: What You're Really Missing at Work That's Holding You Back, which is a practical, intelligent guide to mastering power at work.  We discuss how capable people can end up stalling in their careers, how leadership literature might be encouraging you to do the wrong things, and why figuring out the how-to of workplace power can be particularly useful for women and people of color.  And also why saying you need to deal with workplace power to get ahead in your career would be uncontroversial in many other countries.  

And we're baaaaaaaaack.  Michael took a break to write a manuscript and manage some other life and career things, but here we are.  We're kicking off this new season with an exciting Coaching Realness episode.  Jennie Nash, America's favorite book coach and writing entrepreneur, last seen in Episode 31, returns to the pod, only this time as a client.  Jennie's business is doing great but she's facing a big issue:  namely, that to take things up to the next level she's going to have to let go of things, which is easier said than done.  Michael and Jennie get into what is really at the root of this conundrum, what metrics really matter when you're developing a business, and the role of ego in setting out a compelling vision.  Check out this juicy episode and hear what coaching can sound and feel like. 

What is really goes on inside a mentoring relationship?  How do these unique relationships start, evolve, manage bumps along the road, and be useful to both parties?  In this episode, Michael is joined by Lauren Laitin, the founder of Parachute Coaching who is -- spoiler alert -- Michael's mentee.  They review the random way that they met, what initially kicked off their connection, when it turned into a mentoring relationship, and what they've learned along the way. This episode has some mentoring realness a-ha's that you are unlikely to find elsewhere, such as:  mentors aren't motivated primarily by whether they like you.  And: you might have disagreements or conflicts with your mentor.  Best practices for creating your own healthy mentor relationships at the end of the episode. 

In 2018, Lauren Baer ran for Congress from Florida's 18th District.  She won the Democratic primary handily and came close to unseating her rival in a deep-red district.  While she had a stellar professional background, including stints working directly for two Secretaries of State and for the Ambassador to the United Nations, she was a first-time candidate and her district had never had an out, lesbian mom candidate running for the seat.  She now runs Arena.run, an organization that prepares new candidates for office and trains staff to be effective.  But years before all this, Lauren found herself in a career transition, wondering what she could or should do, and how she would accomplish that.  That's when she and our host met, and it's when she was confronted big time with the anxieties and satisfactions that come up in networking.  In this episode, Lauren talks with Coach Michael about her initial views on networking, how she made the process work with her, and how she took it to the next level when running for office. She also has great advice for people thinking of public office but who haven't quite taken the first step.  An extra-delightful and interesting episode!

It's time for another real coaching session.  Michael's client-for-the-day is Meghan Daum, host of The Unspeakable podcast and author of many bestselling and critically acclaimed books, including The Problem With Everything.  Meghan is a writer who hit all the marks of literary success early in her career.  She published her first collection of essays at 30, and since then has written several additional books of essays plus a comic novel.  But in recent years she's made a big pivot and this has presented big challenges, as she shared in a fascinating episode she called The Tyranny of the Mid-Career Pivot.  So Michael invited her on the show to have a coaching session about it.  Michael is a huge fan of Meghan's work but in this episode is just a coach.  The topic in front of them relates a lot to money - namely, how to make more of it.  Curious?  Tune in. This is some good stuff!

We often plan our lives assuming best-case scenarios:  the fastest commute, the home that will always rise in value, the jump to a new exciting job.  But sometimes we have to deal with things that are not on our wish lists.  One of these is disability.  Disabilities can be temporary or permanent, hidden or visible, predictable or a total surprise.  At least 15 percent of the workforce deals with disability.  What can you do to manage this?  And what should your company be doing?  In this episode, we are joined by Michael's business school classmate, Ed Gray, who is Director of Partnering Programs and Accessibility at Avid.  In the past few years, he gradually lost his eyesight and he talks about his journey, what he's learned about living with a disability, and how you can navigate disability – and help your company navigate it as well. Notwithstanding the serious nature of the subject, Ed is as much a character now as he was when Michael met him in the 1990s.  Join us for an informative, heartfelt, serious and funny conversation. 

What if you end up achieving a big dream, but discover that it's someone else's dream, not your own?  What do you do then?   This week, we are joined by Executive Coach Jennifer Chow Bevan.  Jenn and Michael talk about how putting your head down and working hard isn't always the best strategy for career happiness, and how true insight is difficult but can come over time.  We talk about imposter syndrome, pivotal feedback moments that shake up our thinking, the pluses and minuses of the immigrant experience as it relates to careers, why "presence" is a loaded word, and what to do when we discover that the behaviors that got us here aren't necessarily going to get us there.  A very personal, wide-ranging and fun conversation. 

This week we go DEEP and ask:  If you were really present in your life, as opposed to being stuck in your head most of the time, what might you experience?  Michael is joined by executive coach Duncan Drechsel, who walks us through the subtleties of this thing called awareness:  what is it, why it is important, and how we can develop it.  We learn how cultivating awareness fits into leadership – and how our busy, task-oriented work lives seemed almost designed to prevent any actual awareness.  Duncan shares three specific techniques for beginning to cultivating this mysterious but essential quality and – spoiler alert – none of these have to do with thinking harder.