Protagion’s mentors and coaches cover a wide variety of career goals, offering their expertise and experience to support our proteges with their professional career development. Those familiar with our protege platform know there are over 30 career goals to select from, as well as the ability to set your own and track your progress.

Given this broad range, we’ve also distilled it down to 9 main categories, noting that we will each have different goals at different phases of our lives and careers. Which of the categories are most relevant to you right now?

More detail on these 9, including selected mentors and coaches who can support with each, as well as links to our articles on topics related to that objective, is available on our website. They are accessible by hovering above the “Proteges” heading in the banner on the top of each page until “Career Goals” appears, and then selecting those of interest. The link to each of the 9 groupings is shared below for ease too:

• Promotion i.e. aiming to get ahead in your career, recognising that there are different levels in one’s career (Manager of Others, Manager of Managers, Manager of Function, Manager of Business, and Manager of Group)
• New Skills, including technical ones, leadership, presentation etc
• Further Professional Qualifications i.e. studying further – examples include Masters, Fellowship, CFA, MBA etc
• Moving Countries for work, including experiencing a new culture with new norms & expectations
• Switching roles – for example into consulting from industry, or into contracting or gig working, or into a startup environment
• Career Transition i.e. changing specialism or profession
• Managing a Business including setting direction, executing your vision, building lasting relationships, driving change etc
• Establishing a Portfolio Career including sharing your executive expertise and building alternative income streams
• Searching for Purpose & Meaning

We trust you will find these categories and resources helpful as you develop in your own career – we’re happy to help when you need us, including personalised suggestions as well as coaching or mentoring from experienced professionals.

We conclude this post with some insights from the career survey we’re running publicly i.e. open to all professionals to participate. Please do share your thoughts with us if you haven’t already. In addition to your top career goals, the survey explores what drives you, career questions you’ve faced, how you address them, your sources of guidance/support and more…

The roles of Chief of Staff (CoS), Business Manager and/or Executive Assistant (EA) are still evolving in modern organisations. They have the potential to be valuable to both the executive being assisted and the individual performing the role. The executive is looking for support to become more productive, get more done and have a broader impact i.e. to optimise their use of time, energy and attention. 

To achieve exclusively this objective, their choice of CoS would need to be an experienced business generalist who can thrive in almost any business area, seeing critical projects through to completion. Seasoned consultants engaged in this way can provide a sounding board to the executive and help remove delivery challenges and improve visibility and communication across the business. Such a role can be rewarding and satisfying professionally for the individual.

Often though, the executive has an additional reason for the role: to develop future talent in the organisation by giving them exposure to senior challenges and decision-making. In this case, the individual is doing the role to learn, and hence wants to maximise the insight they can gain from the executive (and time spent with them). This extra commitment for the leader can add to the pressure they face i.e. may not achieve the objective of making them more effective.

Where development of the individual is a major reason for the role, we find that having another independent mentor/coach as a support for the high-potential employee can help. This gives them a further source of professional insight who believes in their ability, talks through potential issues with them, and helps them rise to new challenges, while also freeing up the executive’s time.

Regular readers will know that the Chief of Staff role is a topic we’ve written about before. Our first article on this (Executive Assistant roles – a worthwhile seat at the executive table?) shared insights from people who’ve done the role. In it, we also highlighted the two main types of individuals who these roles appeal to: (i) ambitious individuals seeing the role as a stepping stone, and (ii) people committed to supporting executives for the longer term. Roles for the first category are rotational ones, lasting roughly a year or two. These are often springboards to bigger jobs because sitting in the board meetings allows the individual to build relationships and credibility with the leader’s direct reports. In contrast, people in the second category often remain Chief of Staff for five years or more as a career choice. Our second article Shadowing Executives: Top 10 Lessons discussed what the Executive Assistants, Business Managers and Chiefs of Staff learnt while working with their executive teams. 

In this post, we expand on our previous work by exploring Dan Ciampa’s Harvard Business Review article called ‘The Case for a Chief of Staff’. We agree that the role has had a fluid definition, and that article helps by providing a framework for the principal duties of a CoS, three different levels of the role, the skills needed to perform them well. Read more to explore Dan’s insights, as well as see Harriet Green’s reflections on what makes a great CoS / CEO relationship.

Some of our proteges ask our mentors and especially our coaches about how to discover their sense of purpose i.e. the broader why which motivates them and which could offer more meaning if they align their work with it. Tara Mohr, author of Playing Big*, names our desires to contribute to the world 'callings', and says there are different types: community callings, career callings, and creative or vocational callings. She defines a calling as “an inner sense of longing or inspiration to fill a particular need in the world”.

Read more to discover Tara’s calling driving her to create her Playing Big programme to inspire others to achieve their dreams, as well as explore ways to recognise our own callings, including some familiar to me in my passion for people development, and my yearning to found Protagion to help professionals actively manage our careers.