Career Stewardship with Michael Melcher: a new podcast to help move your career forward in 20 minutes a day

Leadership coach Michael Melcher is advising professionals on what to do about their careers during lockdown

Covid-19 is prompting lots of leaders to look for ways to strengthen their careers. In this moment, whether you’re making the most of what you have, looking for a new job, or trying to figure out what you really want, it can be challenging to find solid career guidance and overwhelming to take the next steps. 

I’ve just launched a new podcast, Career Stewardship with Michael Melcher, to help folks move their careers forward right now. Each episode offers best practices, stories from the field, and bite-sized tips to help build your career success in both the short and long term. 

Over the 20 episodes of the series, I’ll be joined by several of my Next Step Partners coaching colleagues as well as other major national thought leaders. We’ll cover everything from career pivots, to escaping ageism, to identifying your core values, to interviewing techniques, to dealing with rejection—and more. 

Managing Your Career

Career stewardship is about taking the reins of your career rather than waiting around for things to happen (you might be waiting a long time). It’s about being the protagonist of your own story rather than letting someone else determine where you’re going. It’s about taking small steps every day and trying new things—and substituting incremental movement in the place of drama and angst. 

As an executive coach and a partner at Next Step Partners, I’ve helped hundreds of professionals figure out what to do about their careers, and I’ve navigated several major career transitions myself. Before becoming a coach, I served as a foreign service officer in the U.S. Department of State, earned JD and MBA degrees at Stanford University, worked as an attorney with Davis Polk & Wardwell and D.E. Shaw, and was even the CEO of an internet startup focusing on immigration issues. 

The First Five Episodes are Out Now  

Episode One: The Career Stewardship Framework sets out a four-part model for managing your career and shares the secret ingredient to moving your career forward. Among other things, we learn that rich people often give their kids bad career advice, that people from Harvard Business School frequently don’t communicate well, and that what you need for long-term career success only partly relates to what you do all day.  Also, the things you do in a job search are the types of things you should be doing all the time.   

Other episodes in the first release include:

• Relationship Building and “The Strength of Weak Ties” which explains how you don’t need a big rolodex populated with powerful names to improve your career prospects.
• Decoding Your Values which gives you tools to build a career that’s in tune with who you really are.
• Career Pivots which identifies the ins and outs of making a big career change, even when you have a few years under your belt.
• Dealing with Age which covers how to deactivate potential age-related landmines and how to get what you want when you are 40+, 50+ or beyond.

Subscribe to Career Stewardship with Michael Melcher on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcast or your favorite platform. You can find additional resources on the show website: CareerStewardship.com.