Episode #272: Mentor Others To Help Yourself

The title sounds terrible doesn’t it. So selfish and self-serving. The truth is we don’t mentor others because we are too busy and we can’t justify the distraction from concentrating on our own business. That may be true, but we all know that great aphorism about “work on your business, not just in your business”. This idea invites us to climb out of the mud, blood and chaos of daily battle in business, to check we have our ladder up against the right wall. When we look at the situation of others, we become geniuses, but somehow we are too close to our own micro world, to apply the same level of insight. Mentoring gives us a chance to think without the internally induced pressure and therefore to see things which we are often blind to.

Finding people to mentor isn’t hard. Within your company or business circles there will be no shortage of people who can use some additional help and will be open to learning from someone more senior and a lot more experienced. “You can’t put an old head on young shoulders” is another old saw, that is too true. When we are young we think we know everything and are invincible. We add more years to our stay here on earth and we learn things are more complicated than we thought. Getting insight into those future complexities in a timely fashion, to be able to prepare for them, is why having experienced people as mentors is so valuable to the mentee.

The logistics are fairly simple – when and how often should you meet, what will be best to focus on and what do we expect from each other. An excellent rule for both parties is to define how feedback is to be communicated. Everyone knows how to critique ideas, suggestions and opinions. It takes a bit more brainpower to not do that. Instead, try to always focus on moving forward rather than doing retrospective analysis of what went wrong. Look at what is being done, that is being done well. What are their strengths and see if they can build on them. Following on from that, look for suggestions on how to make the performance even better. There is a degree of critique in the latter, but it is explained in a way which is unlikely to have people take offense and then dig their heals in, to justify and defend their position on the matter.

When we are mentoring others, we are reaching back into our own past experiences but also looking ahead, to what we see coming around the corner. We should be doing this in our own business, shouldn’t we. Often we are just stuck in the sticky bog and can’t lift our feet out of the mud. We are stuck where we are, fighting the good fight, day in day out, year after year. When we go back into our memory banks and then project forward, to what we seeing heading our way, we get reminded of things that worked well previously. We reacquaint ourselves with the possibilities for potential disasters over the horizon, that we haven’t gotten around to properly preparing for.

Providing feedback is one of those activities where we become laser sharp in our own understanding of the problem. Somehow contemplating other people’s problems allows us to relax and let the fog clear. When it is our own problem, we are distracted, confused, unclear about what to do. So grappling with other people issues often gives us those light bulb moments, where we realize what we need to be doing. That is one reason why we should always be taking notes, when we have discussions with mentees. When great ideas and insights pop up, don’t miss the gold you uncover in the process of fixing someone else’s problem.

We can also coach the mentee for skill development. What is often funny is when we do this, we quickly realise we are not doing enough coaching of our own troops. It is a good reminder of how powerful this process can be to raise the stakes and get the organization doing a better job from inside out. We also realise not only are we not doing enough in this regard, neither are our middle managers. We need to lead them more closely too about their efforts to keep coaching their own teams.

Mentoring holds the mirror up to our own faces about what we are doing everyday, what we are planning or not planning for and where we need to concentrate the focus of the organization. In this selfish process though, we do genuinely help younger people to progress in their careers. So it will be a win-win. However, here is the snapper - we will never bother doing it in the first place, unless we better understand that it is a real win-win for both parties, rather than a win-lose of our time.