MentoringLeaders
become the leader you need to bE Through Mentoring
Whatever you bring to Mentoring with Maree, whatever outcomes you achieve together,
she wants you, as part of the mentoring engagement, to develop and enhance your
Self-Leadership Skills.
This is where Maree's experience and expertise lies, helping leaders focus on
who they need to BE to lead through these challenging times,
not only on what they need to DO
Be the Self-aware leader
This is a foundational skill for all leaders as you commit to understanding how your habits, beliefs and mindsets, formed over a lifetime, impact your leadership because 90% of your decision making is influenced by them. The mentoring engagement helps you discover, explore and bring them into consciousness so you can ensure they serve your leadership rather than derail it.
Be the emotionally intelligent leader
The ability to identify, name and take ownership of your emotions is the first step in developing your emotional intelligence. When you go further and gain awareness of how your emotions impact others, your leadership is significantly enhanced. Maree sensitively facilitates this process of discovery in the mentoring, seeing you reach a heightened sense of emotional maturity.
Be the pro-active leader
When faced with constant change and unpredictability, when your industry or professional sector is threatened with disruption, when you feel challenged from many sides, a very natural response is a reactive one that disempowers you. Learning how to respond pro-actively, however, to be solution focused, forward thinking and a "can do" leader can be an outcome of the mentoring process for you.
Be the resilient leader
How to develop that psychological inner strength and mental toughness we call resilience is an essential skill for leaders today. In the mentoring process Maree will facilitate the discovery of 6 skills you need to develop if you are to move through and constructively manage the adverse and unexpected events that challenge your leadership, enabling you to become the resilient leader.
be the high energy leader
Learning how to prioritise the management of your energy, rather than your time, is an important part of the mentoring engagement. By doing this you heighten your ability for the sustained physical and mental activity that leadership demands today. You will discover what charges your energy and how to enhance that and what drains your energy and how to avoid that or at least manage it better.
be the leader who integrates work/life
In an "always on" workplace work/life balance is a fantasy. The reality, however, can be very stressful and demanding. The alternative is to create a flow of benefits back and forth between your life and your work. In the mentoring process Maree will lead you through ways to do this, resulting in enhanced personal relationships, good health, a sense of well being, appropriate levels of stress and optimum performance as a leader.
Be the leader who networks and connects
Being a leader can be a lonely act. You go it alone at your peril. It's a key leadership skill knowing how and where to invest time, energy and money into building connections that support and inspire your leadership. You will learn how to develop and sustain networks of empowered and empowering people through the mentoring engagement.
The Three Conversations Leaders Need to be having
The Public Conversation
The private Conversation
The Transformational Conversation
A mentor is an ideal person with whom to have these conversations
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The Public Conversation
This is the conversation that you all confidently engage in because you all share the same experience. You know you will not be personally judged. There is nothing to fear in sharing your experience, in fact much to be gained from hearing how others are managing and/or resolving the same concerns. The challenges you face are not due to personal inadequacies in your leadership but rather about issues external to it - inability to get staff and retain them, the global economy, COVID, the ongoing uncertainty and unpredictability in your industry or professional sector, changing government policies, cyber-security, to name just a few concerns that impact your life as a leader. You will also converse about these issues with your board, staff and stakeholders. They are on the agenda for every meeting of your professional association and every industry sector conference. You will even converse with the media and write opinion pieces on these issues. In fact doing so can enhance your leadership credentials.
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The private conversation
"You wouldn't stand up in front of a group of people who work for you - or who have funded you - and say: I'm scared to death; I'm in over my head; I don't know what I am doing. But you need to be saying that to someone. Every leader that I have found, who was managing successfuly and leading successfully, shared in common a mentor or peer group where they could say, I'm in over my head or God, I'm scared with what's going on with the economy right now" - Brené Brown.
If you don't have this conversation with someone you trust, if you continue to let these fears and anxieties keep you awake at night and haunt you during the day, they will derail your leadership. Maree has the experience and expertise to have that private mentoring conversation with you and leave you skilled and empowered at the end to lead with confidence.
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The transformational conversation
This is the conversation that you didn't expect to have, that emerges from your private conversations. Guided by an experienced mentor, you make discoveries about yourself by going below the surface. This is where real transformational change takes place in your life. It's like a journey of exploration you go on, but you don't go alone. You have a mentor who walks the road with you, helping you have aha! moments of insight. That doesn't happen by the mentor transferring her knowledge to you, or by teaching you strategies or giving you frameworks to add to your leadership toolkit. Rather it happens as you come to recognise things about yourself that you "see" for the first time. This is where you discover that self-awareness is actually exciting and liberating. You discover strengths with which you had lost touch. You become resilient, and proactive rather than reactive. You begin to sleep at night. You continue to work with your mentor to enhance everything you have discovered. You feel empowered to lead with a confidence you didn't previously have. Let Maree be your mentor on this journey.
what Maree's clients say about her
Giselle Dowling, Network Optimisation Leader, Bega Cheese Limited.
Maree has provided me with great insights and reflections on my career to date, what I needed to focus on in a new period of my career, and what questions I needed to ask myself to define future goals.
Maree is professional, knowledgeable, and practical in her approach, often anticipating challenges. Thanks for your energy and guidance Maree and I look forward to continuing to work with you in the future.
Tania Differding, Director, Achtung Camper, Geelong.
Maree is an amazing mentor who was extremely personable and accessible to someone who had absolutely no knowlege about leadership and managing staff. She has helped us become better managers and leaders and given us invaluable advice, help and referrals which have greatly helped us in managing our staff and business.
Robyn Blake, CA (NZ), CPA Dip Business Studies (NZ)
I travelled five hours from Dubbo in the Central West Region of New South Wales to Albury to attend a CPA workshop conducted by Maree. She provided great insight into the benefit of using "Soft Skills" in the area of Performance Motivation in both our business and personal worlds.
I could easily relate to the way Maree presented them but I hadn't considered them in the context of managing performance at all levels of an organisation or been able to recognise the practical measures that could be used to do that. I followed up with a phone mentoring session with Maree which she offered to participants which gave me even greater insights into the issues we were working on in our organisation at that time. I really appreciated her time and insight, as it is not often you get the opportunity to spend quality time with someone so knowledgeable in this area of management. It also gave me cause to focus on my own personal brand and what that means for me.
I would thoroughly recommend Maree to anyone wanting a fresh approach to managing positive change in the way we handle the challenges we encounter in both personal and professional aspects of day-today life.
Deb Duncan, Travel Revival, Peak Personality
Our family have know Maree Harris for many years. Myself as a SME business owner, General Manager, Lecturer and Training Lead, my husband as Director of two large manufacturing businesses and our adult daughters, from way back, during intense high school pressures to highly focused personal development - now two successful business women in their late 30s. All four of us are now heavily entrenched in leadership positions. We have all included Maree to brainstorm moving forward when life gets in the way of our decision-making and when we need inspiration, courage, or just plain calm!
Maree is the best listener we could ever ask for. She absorbs herself thoughtfully into the most complex personal and business decisions with which we are challenged and presents us with 'wow' questions to consider. Her guidance always putting us confidently on the right road.
Maree is not just highly qualified and enormously respected within her past professions, but she strives constantly for deeper understandings of the curveballs life continually throws at us all, while instilling calm via thought provoking (and fun) conversation. We always walk away satifsfied, energised and a lot wiser.
I could not ask for a better life mentor/business coach as her heart is filled with passion for us to see the absolute best in ourselves. Thank you Maree for showing us how to see leadership as empowering people to be the best they can be, just as you do for us. Let's all, with your continued support, pay it forward for you Maree.