If you ask any successful person if they made it entirely on their own merits without help and guidance from one or more special people—particularly when they were young—you’d find most are willing to acknowledge the role of mentors in their progress.
There may be exceptions, but I have not encountered one. People need guidance to stretch and grow and to develop a sense of progress as they strive to reach their potential. They need encouragement and support. They need role models, and yes, they need genuine mentors.
What is a mentor? The dictionary definition does not do justice to this important concept, describing it merely as “a wise and trusted counselor,” so let me specify what mentors must do for their protégés.
A mentor
- makes you feel worthwhile by rewarding achievement (praise is a form of reward)
- helps you increasingly become aware of your strengths
- finds ways for you to stretch and grow through encouragement
- never lets you down, personally or professionally.
The foregoing prescriptions for mentoring present a tall order, right? Yet any one of us can mentor another individual if we start with the right assumptions.
First and foremost, there is no manipulation involved. You must be sincere.
Second, any praise for undeserved achievement will produce negative results and weaken the potential benefits that might accrue from well-deserved praise.
Third, do not expect miracles. Depending on the personalities of both parties, guidance can be accepted fully or rejected, especially at first—until trust is built. But guidance efforts can also be misinterpreted, so (as with all relationships) allow the trust to build slowly.
Fourth, allow the mentoring relationship to fail if it goes nowhere. Walk away and let someone else give it a try.
If you are in a leadership role in your organization, you must be willing to mentor others—but do not push it on an unwilling protégé. Similarly, seek mentoring yourself from those with more experience than you, but only if there is apparent willingness on their part.
Interdependencies exist in all human situations. Functional interdependencies of people working together for common purposes are not the only ones that have significance, however. Those of a more personal nature are also critical. The experienced worker must share his learning with those less seasoned, and this can be done openly and effectively even without genuine mentoring taking place; it happens routinely in all but the most dysfunctional settings. But mentoring carries this process several steps further. Mentoring ensures the maximum benefit for the protégé, but also engenders a culture that is open, organic, and vibrant.
The importance of training
Training—different from mentoring—is equally critical to developing your people and to ensuring their continued growth. Not every individual desires to take on more and more responsibility—and that is natural enough—but virtually everyone wants to become more proficient at what they do. It is one way to ensure job security and increase earnings, but it also has an even more profound benefit: It instills a sense of fulfillment.
Technical training that people need to do their jobs is often done well, I find; but all too often the trainers forget one vital thing about learning—it takes place inside the learner’s brain.
I tell my students that they can learn nothing from me. I mean it! No, I do not consider myself a poor teacher, but I do know how people learn. It is a process the learner goes through internally. It is how information is processed by the learner that determines the efficacy of the learning process. Two students hear the same lecture. One listens and hears but is passive. The other listens, challenges what he hears, or blends it with what he already knows, reflects on it, and compares it with related or similar information. Perhaps he allows the new information to replace the old—or he decides to think on it more—but he is actively involved in a process of discovery, growth and enlightenment, and change. It is the trainer’s job to facilitate change, to be a change agent, in fact.
Some kinds of training require specific outcomes. A certain thing should be done in a specific way. For example, if you are training to be an airline pilot there are many specific steps to be taken for safety—if nothing else—and in a specific sequence. But mostly training merely desires a certain outcome, the specific methods and steps being less critical. So concentrate on desired outcomes, and if someone asks why something must be done a certain way, make sure your answer is not “because I say so,” or worse, “because that is always the way we have done it.” There is nothing more soul-destroying than bureaucratic nonsense, and it leads to demoralization.
People who invent their own methods for reaching a desirable outcome tend to be more enthusiastic about their job than those given no flexibility, but make sure there is an appropriate match between an individual’s ability and preparation.
A case in point
This true story illustrates my point on the current topic. I was in a middle management position, years ago, and I often worked late. Almost every evening as I was leaving, I would say goodnight to the cleaning crew, who worked through the night. Old Joe, an amiable fellow, supervised the cleaners and always had a cheery word. I noticed that he applied wax to the terrazzo floor of our lobby every day. I asked him if it was really necessary to wax that floor so often.
“Sure is, Mr. B.,” he said. “The floor wax we use just don’t hold up well, and too many people scuff their feet as they pass through here during the day.”
“You’d think there would be a product that would stand up better,” I said. (This was in the days before advanced polymers.)
“Oh, there is,” Joe said. “But it’s too expensive. The boss man says we have to use this stuff. Looks good when I’m done, though, don’t it? So not my problem.”
If Joe knew there were better products, and if a better product led to less frequent waxing, wouldn’t it be worth trying? Maybe the overall expense would actually decrease? I said nothing of these thoughts to Joe and left him with a kind word.
The next day I spoke to our controller (he oversaw the cleaning crew) and I told him of my exchange with Joe. “Why not let Joe have the freedom to choose his materials and judge the results on an overall basis?” I said. “First cost isn’t everything, as you well know.”
A few days later I ran into Joe in a hardware store. We exchanged a few pleasantries and he asked, “Did you say something to Mr. Sanders, about my terrazzo floor?”
“No, why?”
“Well, the damnedest thing. He told me to find a better product, said I would be free to use whatever I thought best, and he gave me an annual budget. Not just for floor wax, but for all our cleaning materials. I believe I can save the company some money and get better results. What do you think of that, Mr. B.?”
“Just great,” I said. “But just be sure that floor looks good all the time, Joe.”
“Oh, I will. I’m in here checking out all kinds of things that’ll make our jobs easier and get better results.” He paused, looking pensive. “You sure you didn’t say something?”
Joe had been given some freedoms. He now felt more like one of the team.
Though the benefits of delegation are illustrated in the above true story, here is an important caution: Do not deal with this on a piecemeal basis. At every level, and in every function, personnel need to feel the encouragement and inclusion that Joe felt. The importance of a winning culture is in the shared, even-handed approaches that exist throughout. Treat the whole as a team! Each member of the team has a different role to play, but each must feel as though her contribution is vital to goal attainment of the whole. This culture must be evident and pervasive!
As for training of the other kind—aimed at improving personal interaction with customers and other employees, or having to do with nontechnical issues—the right approach is to have the best performers do the training on the job, day to day, rather than in a formal setting. This is not to say that a classroom session or two is out of the question, but frankly, hands-on, on-site job training is far superior to any other. And it’s ideal in most circumstances. But watch out for personality clashes and the possibility of a domineering individual ruining the learning process. Mature people can deal with pompous and heavy-handed trainers up to a point. But choose your trainers wisely. They can make or break the learning process in all kinds of quirky ways.
Note: This article is excerpted from Effective Management by A. Keith Barnes.
© 2013 ASTD, Alexandria, VA. All rights reserved.