Entrepreneurs, Let’s Talk About Advice

Every professional strives to be an expert in their particular niche. Whether you build the best products or provide the best service, you work tirelessly to ensure you are a thought leader in your industry. Breaking new ground and forging ahead is what you’re all about. Here’s a particularly tricky problem for entrepreneurs and anyone running fledgling businesses, though: who do you seek out when you need advice or expertise on topics and concepts that you know nothing about?

1. Getting The Best Advice Matters

Finding resources and information about topics like employee mentoring, executive coaching and development, and compensating for the employment paradigm shift of Generation Y is not a simple matter of doing some Google searching. Quality answers from experts are an absolute must.

You need to know who to talk to and why their experience matters. Moreover, if their advice is not completely applicable to what you do, you are back at square one. What do you do? You establish a network of trust over time with the right experts, and it is going to take some practice. At TurtleWise, we refer to this network as a “Clusters of Excellence,” basically, a space created by a group to learn and innovate together. Here are a few tips on how to make that happen:

2. Find The Right “Cluster of Excellence”

The first step is often the most difficult for motivated, busy professional: finding a group of peers or mentors and peers that will form the foundation of your “Cluster of Excellence”. Finding a group of experienced individuals with extensive knowledge and practical know-how across many topics and industries isn’t exactly easy.

Meetups and mastermind groups abound, but you want to direct your focus on finding the right cluster of excellence for your needs. Members provide the answers to your questions and demonstrate why their experience and advice are relevant. That being said, access to this information from reliable experienced sources is priceless when it comes to furthering your career or growing a business.

As a highly motivated self-starter, you may find it difficult at first to ask for advice or help with resolving a problem or difficulty. Keep in mind that sharing and advising is why these groups exist. It will get easier with practice.

3. Learn How To Ask Better Questions

Everyone has their own particular method of inquiry that works for them. It’s how we learn to gather new, relevant information and research before we arrange it in an understandable format. Each method will be more or less effective due to individual personality, temperament and learning styles. Despite the many differences, there are a few simple rules that can improve anyone’s method for acquiring, comprehending and applying new knowledge.

Ask more open-ended questions when looking for advice or information from a peer or expert within your cluster of excellence. Listen more than you talk, and take good notes. Research what you talked about and come back to your next meetup/mastermind group session with additional questions drawn from what you read, saw and heard. This encourages dialog and creates additional opportunities for group members to learn from one another. Improving your questioning and inquiry skills is critical to the success of any peer and mentor group.

4. Share What You Learn

Progress loses its value when results are not measurable. You and all the members of your center need to come together on a regular basis to celebrate progress or discuss obstacles you are struggling to overcome.Sharing with the group also allows mentors to provide feedback and further suggestions using your progress to date. Showing what you know, getting feedback, and celebrating growth together is what makes a network effective for you, the group, and everyone you work with daily.
Keep in mind it may take you more than one group and several tries before you find that group that works best for you. Once you find that network however, your potential is limited only by your willingness to share, grow and change. Better still, there’s a way you can bypass the time-consuming aspects of the network building process: TurtleWise.

TurtleWise: Build Your “Cluster of Excellence” Faster

Don’t have a contact list of experts across every economic sector imaginable?
Neither do most people. Access to the people “in the know” and willing to share their knowledge has always been a serious obstacle to overcome for professionals and executives. With TurtleWise, accessing your trusted network, whether that’s through your corporate teamwork page or through individually developed relationships built within the TurtleWise milieu.

Using TurtleWise, you immediately have access to a broad network of expert practitioners who are eager to share their expertise and discuss the fine details of building a truly successful career or enterprise.  Here’s a brief overview of the process:

1. Send/Receive a Question To Be Answered
   

   Every initial exchange over the Turtlewise platform begins anonymously. You ask or respond to a question and then explain in brief why your experience is relevant to the question and your proposed answer.

2. Exchanges Are Purposely Limited At First

Interactions are kept brief by setting a timer on all questions, encouraging users to answer questions before the timer expires and aiding the momentum of a conversation.

3. Expertise is Revealed With Answers

If another user answers your questions, it will present you with a brief overview of why their experience is relevant to their answer.

4. Keep Going or Move On

Once you receive an answer to a question, you can either wait for another user to respond, or wait until your question expires and ask again later. If you got the answer you needed and think the person who responded is a good match to continue the discussion and get more information, you can engage further through a chat.

The purpose of TurtleWise is to empower its participants through what they do. Through the Q&A and chat process, users begin to build their network of professional contacts and establish mentoring/coaching relationships as they continue to exchange ideas.

Using TurtleWise do coach and develop leaders and resolve problems creates a lasting impact for you as an individual, and when used as part of a business innovation and professional development initiative, across your entire organization. Are you getting the best advice and professional development? Maybe it’s time you or your business tried TurtleWise.

Learn more by downloading one of our mentoring guides, or start with a demo to see how you or your organization can improve coaching, development and innovation through TurtleWise.