Most successful leaders consider the development of people as a key leadership function. Aspiring leaders need guidance and role models if they are to effectively grow into their own leadership roles. Mentoring provides an established leader an opportunity to influence and teach an understudy by sharing knowledge and wisdom that has been accumulated over years of experience. Thus the mentor can not only reinforce the established practices, core values, and overall culture of the company, but can also challenge the understudy to see and think in new and different ways.
The benefits to the understudy are numerous. Broader knowledge, enhanced critical thinking, and an expanded professional network are but a few of the potential gains. Once the understudy has developed over time and assumed a leadership role, at some point the former pupil will likely become a mentor and pass along the value of their own experience. A culture of continuous learning is thereby established where corporate memory and corporate ideals are shared, reinforced, and retained.
Speaking of benefits, the mentor can reap a significant return for the time and effort spent in further developing more junior associates. Below are several of those rewards:
- It can sharpen the mentor’s skills. The understudy should be expected to question everything, and in so doing the mentor will be expected to provide thoughtful, reasoned answers. Thinking about and answering questions concerning virtually every area of the business will challenge the mentor. Additionally, the mentor will be dealing with someone who is presumably younger, and who can perhaps bring a fresh perspective to problems or opportunities that the mentor may not have previously considered.
- It can provide solutions to existing problems. A mentor who tasks an understudy with a specific business problem to delve into and then propose solutions for are not only developing the skills of the understudy, but bringing about a potential resolution to an existing obstruction.
- It can retain the top leadership talent in the company. Retention and succession planning are important for any organization. Developing home-grown talent and then creating the right conditions for enticing them to stay is a very cost-effective way to build and then keep a leadership team.
- It can be personally satisfying. If you believe that what you get is in direct proportion to what you give, then having an active role in the personal and professional growth of others will be immensely satisfying. Giving of ourselves is one of the greatest gifts we can offer. Seeing the results of those mentoring efforts giving rise to the blossoming of a successful, competent leader will indeed bring great fulfillment.
Leadership mentoring involves many things, but ultimately it is all about performance. Not just results, not just career progression, but performance. A leader can enhance the performance of an understudy with coaching and direction, to be sure, but that mentoring relationship has the potential to improve the mentor’s own performance, as noted above. Adding bright, motivated, energetic young leaders to the management team can also benefit the senior leader with an improved performance of the organization as a whole.
Leaders have a large stake in mentoring, for the good of everyone involved.
Another great article, Jerry. I would only add that today, the mentoring process is somewhat harder to accomplish when the target won’t accept the help.
Too often, these new college know-it-alls come pre-packaged.
To them, old people are just that…something that needs to get out of their way.
Like many of the art forms, good business practices will eventually be lost.
Not because folks didn’t try to mentor, but because others wouldn’t listen.
Doug, I admit that the first few years out of college certainly present an unfamiliar territory. You’re not sure if you should be able to enter the workforce answering all the questions thrown at you or if it’s OK to be vulnerable and green. An internship for new graduates is an important step for young professionals to gain confidence and knowledge of the workplace. This also gives them an opportunity to understand their place in the hierarchy and begin to learn from mentors.
I’m sure our generation was likewise thought to be all-knowing. After all, we were the Baby Boomers intent upon changing the world. For those of any generation who feel mentoring is a waste of their otherwise precious time, in the end it will be their loss.
this is very meaningful to me as I bounced around after college not sure where I fit in and not having the guidance to find it. had I had a mentor, perhaps things would have been easier or at least given me the outlet to discover what it is I wanted to do. So glad you write about the importance of the mentor and understudy. Its a needed development on the path of career and life.
Maybe you can give what you didn’t get, Courtney. You can see the value it could provide someone else.
Agree about performance standards. We just can’t be leaders if we don’t set a bar and move as a team towards it. This is a fabulous article and can’t wait to tweet it to my tribe!
Always got to be about performance, not just about how to do stuff. Otherwise, it’s a waste of enormous amounts of invested time. Thanks, Becky.