Remote Career Development: Mark Roy Of Breakthrough Consulting Group LLC On How To Advance and Enhance Your Career When You Are Working Remotely
An Interview With David Liu
Managers should show and state their desire for and support of their team members’ success and personal wellbeing. This reinforces a sense of trust over time, which makes employees feel more engaged and valued.
Career development is the ongoing process of choosing, improving, developing, and advancing your career. This involves learning, making decisions, collaboration with others and knowing yourself well enough to be able to continually assess your strengths and weaknesses. This can be challenging enough when you work in an office, but what if you work remotely? How does remote work affect your career development? How do you nurture and advance your career when you are working from home and away from other colleagues? How can you help your employees do this? To address these questions, we started an interview series called “How To Advance and Enhance Your Career When You Are Working Remotely”. As a part of this interview series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Mark Roy, Founder and Principal of Breakthrough Consulting Group.
Mark Roy founded Breakthrough Consulting Group LLC to partner with leaders and teams to ignite insights and create conditions that support transformational change. Mark is an executive coach and trusted thought partner to senior leaders, entrepreneurs and organizations, helping them achieve next-level leadership, inclusion and performance goals. To learn more about Mark, please visit https://breakthroughcgllc.com/about-us.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. What is your “backstory”?
Instead of climbing the corporate ladder, I opted for a spiral staircase. I strove to do work that made a difference, hence portions of my career spent in book publishing and issues advocacy for nonprofits through public media and executive coaching. The through line has always been a deep desire to help people get from where they are to where they want to be.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
One of the most rewarding parts of my career was helping to make history leading the PR campaigns for some of the marriage equality lawsuits across the U.S. during the early ’00s. Perhaps the two most interesting things I’ve done professionally were working with a client behind bars while I was a literary agent and buying a vintage broach as a thank you gift for legendary broach aficionado, former Secretary of State Madeline Albright.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
My first fulltime job out of college included assisting my supervisor, the owner and publisher of a newsletter publishing company, with his junk mail… I mean “direct mail” … business. It was a piece of humble pie served to this Literature/Writing major from a global top 50 university. I basically had to unlearn the training from my writing program TO SHOUT IN HYPERBOLE!
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
When I was 13, my parents gave me a religious book in which they inscribed, “Fear nothing; thank God.” The spirit of those words seeped into the nooks and crannies of the organ encased in my skull, which has freed me to try new things like spending a year abroad, moving across the country — and, more frightening still, moving out of the city to the suburbs.
I recently asked my now-octogenarian mother this question and she reported that my grandmother told her, “Never trust a fart.” From the profound to the profane, my family’s matriarchs past and present have me covered!
What advice would you give to other business leaders to help their employees thrive and avoid burnout?
Listen. Ask your employees how they’re doing. Ask them about what they’ve been doing to help break up some of the monotony of going from their bedroom to their breakfast table to set up shop for the day. Ask them how they’ve been able to juggle work duties with family duties when all of them seem like a mishmash to slog through each day. Then ask them what is one thing you could do to help alleviate one of their pain points.
Then act. The worst thing management can do is ask for feedback and ignore it. At the very least, managers must acknowledge the feedback. If the organization can’t implement something employees are asking for, they’ll want to know why. Tell them. And, if the reason sounds defensive, it probably is and therefore the request needs management’s further attention to at least find a compromise solution.
Ok, let’s jump to the core of our interview. Working remotely can be very different than working with a team that is in front of you. This provides great opportunities but it can also create unique challenges. To begin, can you articulate for our readers a few of the main benefits and opportunities of working remotely?
One of the benefits of working remotely is the recouped time that people have in their days when they don’t have a commute. Many employees are reluctant to give this time up because they’ve been able to use it for personal improvement, being present with their families, or simply getting more work done by starting their workday earlier and finishing later when they’d otherwise be commuting. Polls show that people are willing to give up 20% of their pay before they’d give up the convenience of working remotely.
At the same time, one of the drawbacks for people working from home is that the lines between work and life outside of work can get even blurrier if employers and employees aren’t properly setting and observing boundaries. This requires trust on the part of managers that their employees will get their work done on time and with limited supervision. For employees, this requires excellent time management skills and the courage to ask for help when they’re struggling.
And people are struggling. Employees have been incredibly productive because they’re so busy — sometimes too busy. Others are suffering from depression or anxiety due to the pandemic-induced isolation, let alone those who have caught COVID-19 or are caring for elderly family members or children who have the illness. The record number of drug overdoses and rising rates of mental illness reflect some of the impact the pandemic has had on people’s wellbeing.
Can you articulate for our readers what the five main challenges are regarding working remotely?
We have offered our clients five tips for organizations to help their remote workers feel valued and included:
- Up-skill managers with cyber team-building skills.
Because social interactions don’t happen organically with dispersed team members, managers need to learn how to create authentic opportunities for team members to build trust and social bonds that reinforce trust and build empathy for one another. These skills require training, practice and reinforcement through accountability.
2. Amplify, exhibit and celebrate cultural values at all levels of the organization in internal communications campaigns.
Articulating the vision and mission of the organization creates a transcendent purpose in which individual employees can see themselves being a part of something larger than themselves. Moreover, showing an organization’s values in action reinforce their importance as cultural currency, especially when they’re both modeled by senior leaders and recognized and celebrated by pointing out employees who embody those values.
3. Regional team meetups for networking and building social bonds.
Creating opportunities for people to bond in person once it is safe to do so will help inject some of the social glue that binds people together.
4. Take a page from your favorite college professor’s playbook and create a weekly “office hours” block on the calendar.
The aim of this standing time on your team calendar is to allow employees to meet with fellow team members for a chat at a set time that doesn’t have a formal agenda. Informal, social interactions need to be adapted to a hybrid environment, which requires intentionality, but the time itself needn’t be structured. The goal is to provide a space where informal, social interactions can spark social bonds and build trust among team members over time.
5. Model empathy.
Managers should show and state their desire for and support of their team members’ success and personal wellbeing. This reinforces a sense of trust over time, which makes employees feel more engaged and valued.
Based on your experience, what can one do to address or redress each of those challenges? Can you give a story or example for each?
Uh-oh, I jumped the gun! I made the case for each of the five recommendations already. Sorry!
Let’s talk about Career Development. Can you share a few ideas about how you can nurture and advance your career when you are working from home and away from other colleagues?
Perhaps counterintuitively, working remotely is a great equalizer for career opportunities. Facetime isn’t a thing so much while everyone is working remotely. So, employees have an opportunity to dive into their work, anticipate their supervisor’s needs, and proactively drive their performance to the next level.
Employees should also take advantage of any leadership development or networking programs their employers are offering. Frankly, employers are doing everything they can to hold onto their employees because they don’t want them to become a part of the “Great Resignation.” Some of the programs that employers are rolling out to stem that tide include leadership development programs that involve everything from online learning to executive coaching, along with sponsorship and mentorship opportunities. All these employee development programs will help employees develop their skills and generate opportunities where they can showcase their leadership potential.
Can you share a few ideas about how employers or managers can help their team with career development?
The best employers are already investing in the learning and development programs that are engaging their employees and getting them excited about their leadership journeys. Finding high-potential employees and paring them with sponsors who can advocate for their sponsees when they spot appropriate stretch assignments for them keeps both current and future leaders of the organization engaged in leadership development catered to the needs of the business.
For managers, I recommend creating a monthly 1:1 with their employees where the only agenda item is to check in with their employees on their professional development plan. Ask them how they’re doing with building the skills they ideally identified at the beginning of the year that they wanted to refine. Ask them how you can support their growth in the areas they indicated they wanted to grow and offer feedback about how they’re doing against the metrics that the two of you identified as indicators of success. To be effective, feedback needs to be ongoing instead of annual so people can either course correct or amplify their performance.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
People often talk about building bridges to bring people together. I love that approach and I try to do it often, but I think there’s another image just as powerful. I often ask my clients to picture themselves on a ladder in which they have one hand extended below them to help those below them climb up, while their other hand is extended above them where those above them are extending their own hands to help.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
I’d be honored if your readers followed me on LinkedIn (https://linkedin.com/in/marksroy) or visited my firm’s website where visitors can subscribe to our mailing list (https://breakthroughcgllc.com/).
Thank you for these great insights! We wish you continued success
Thank you for the invitation to share these thoughts; I enjoyed it!
