Strategic Relationships at Work: Creating Your Circle of Mentors, Sponsors, and Peers for Success in Business and Life

With job mobility increasing, globalization expanding, and technology advancing, you need more than a steady job and a solid network to keep your career on track. You need mentors--to learn and to grow--whether you're just starting out, are firmly established, or at the top of your profession. Everyone has something to learn, and everyone has something to teach.

Introducing Strategic Relationships at Work:

The first comprehensive mentoring guide written specifically for 21st-century career building, this entrepreneurial approach to work relationships addresses the key issues of our time:

• Job Mobility: How to make personal connections you can transfer from job to job
• Globalization: What you can learn from new mentors in a larger global context
• Technology: How to engage with the latest advances in social media and technology
• Pace of Change: What you can do to keep up--with a little help from your friends

Using simple tools and proven strategies, this essential guide shows you how to leverage the relationships you already have to map out a new developmental network that grows with your career. You'll learn the secrets of companies with excellent developmental cultures, including IBM, Procter & Gamble, Sodexo, and KPMG. You'll discover the most effective ways to develop new talent in your workplace through formal programs that leverage mentors, sponsors, coaches, reverse mentors, and mentoring circles. You'll learn how leaders create work cultures where both formal and informal mentoring thrive. And you'll find handy charts and checklists to assess your work, your relationships, and your career path.

MENTORING FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM

Whether you plan to move in and out of the workforce, make lateral or nontraditional career moves, or simply want to learn or teach new skills, Strategic Relationships at Work will help you take control of your destiny--and build the career or company that you envision.

This powerful guide helps you leverage your interpersonal skills using the most effective tools available. You'll find ready-to-use checklists and worksheets, self-assessments, refl ective exercises, graphs, charts, and other visual tools to map out your own personal network of developers inside and outside of work. This is how you build a career that grows along with you. This is Strategic Relationships at Work.

"Receiving and providing mentoring are crucial for professional growth at any age, but too often we leave these learning opportunities to chance. This much-needed book offers a smart, practical plan for taking charge of our own development by building authentic relationships throughout our careers." -- JOHN R. RYAN, President and CEO, Center for Creative Leadership

"Murphy and Kram show us why you can't go it alone--no matter how talented or hardworking you are--and that the best route to cultivating great mentors is learning to be a great mentee." -- SHEILA HEEN, coauthor of Thanks for the Feedback and Difficult Conversations

"A perennial resource for people at all phases of their careers." -- RANDY EMELO, President and CEO, Triple Creek River

"Life is tough enough--make it easier by reading this book and following the authors' insights." -- RICHARD BOYATZIS, PhD, coauthor of Primal Leadership

Wendy C. M. Murphy, PhD, is Associate Professor of Management at Babson College. She also serves as the Coordinator for the Mentoring Programs through the Center for Women's Entrepreneurial Leadership (CWEL). Her research appears in a variety of journals.

Kathy E. Kram, PhD, is the Richard C. Shipley Professor in Management at the Boston University School of Management. She is also the author of the book Mentoring at Work and the coeditor of The Handbook of Mentoring at Work, and she has published in a wide range of journals.