Spending an entire weekend with my family doesn’t always sound like the most fun but it is when I get a chance to listen to my Wine cabinet. No I’m not referring to some piece of furniture but I am referring to my father and sister. I get into some of the best conversations over a beer or bottle of wine with two people who I value their management experience. My father is on the tale end of a long career in dentistry running his own practice and my oldest sister with her masters from Marquette university has worked for JP Morgan Chase and Kohl’s Department Store Corporate offices. They are a wealth of information and perspective and while I may not agree with them on every subject I’m alway willing to listen to their perspective on a number of things. To me what is important isn’t the fact that it is nice to have a good conversation with my family members but to have people outside of our businesses to talk about ideas and philosophies. Some of the topics from this time around included why my office is nicknamed Vegas, the 1.2 second rule and my father the original social network. I’m sure all of these topics will make it into future posts.
We hear a lot about what are called “kitchen cabinets” for executives of corporations where top level executives keep a core group of trusted advisors, maybe former executives or current executives in the company or out that are used to talk through major decisions and plans. Some of these get referred to as “good ol’ boys clubs” but for the most part they are more than that. For the sake of this discussion the “good ol’ boys” clubs are more of a political structure within a company and not really the point of this post so I’ll leave that topic for another day. What this topic is about is the people you keep around yourself as mentors in your life.
We all have many different sides to our lives. Our lives have many sides such as business, social, family and personal. During the course of our lives we find people that we come to trust advice from for each of these sides. So do you have established cabinets that you convene with to discuss these topics? I do and in fact have several cabinets that fall back to on a regular basis. Like I said cabinets can be there for different parts of our lives and also cabinets can fluctuate the people and topics that are discussed within them. Here is a sampling of my more career focused cabinets that to go for advice and conversation.
My Wine Cabinet(Family Cabinet)
Really only my sister and father and typically what we talk about is people management. We talk about working with employees, employee development and office management. Since this is the one thing that all of us have in common it seems the be the topic that comes up the most. My favorite piece of advice from this group lies somewhere between treating your employees like humans to making your employees self-sufficient without you. Ironically this is my most “old school” business group that I talk to. A side benefit to this group is the connections to other conventional business executives that I have thanks to these cabinet members.
My Bridge Cabinet
This group fluctuates between 5 different people and they are referred to as my Bridge cabinet not because of some silly card game but because these are the folks that bridge my two different worlds that I operate in. By day I am an operations manager for printing firm but in my spare time I leverage my masters in business and passion for social media for other projects. These are the groups of people that understand both worlds and keep me grounded in one and growing in the other. Odd as this sounds these folks sometimes keep me from making the wrong decision professionally while helping me expand my career perspectives. It is an odd group but one that truly gives me a ton of good feedback and information. There are many times, I will sit quietly and try to absorb the conversation trying to take as many mental notes as possible. These people make me better in this career and the next. They are also some great friends.
My SoMe Cabinet
After completing my degree in business and marketing there is a point when I realized that what I am currently doing may not be what I will be doing later on. That’s when the fear hits you with how I do I jump careers without losing my current economic foothold? Part of the answer is widening your experience with people you can learn from and figure out that transition over time. This is where I have come to love some of my closest social media friendships. Now I can feel the eyes rolling but this is really true. Over the course of our lives we typically end up with a group of friends that is fairly homogeneous to who we are. Social media, especially twitter, allow you to break out of that mold to find people that you be interested in for their knowledge. Of course to connect with people there needs to be some common threads but these connections still seem to be a bit looser. However for me the core group of 5-8 people in this group really I don’t think I would have met any of them without social media. Now of course social media has the added benefit to have this group swell to a larger group as information can be found all over the place. However the ability to filter information is important as not all the information found will be useful. Through this path though I have managed to meet and have conversations with people who’d I would only read about on their book covers.
So that is a short list of some of the cabinets that I meet with on a regular basis to talk shop, learn and bounce ideas off of. These people are extremely important in my growth and development as a person in the business and personal world. While I gave you my more business focused groups that I go to I have several others that include personal, financial and other facets of my life. I believe these kind of cabinets, advisors, mentors or whatever you want to call them are important to creating an environment of support for yourself personally and professionally. What about you, where do you go for advice and guidance to the various issues in your life?
