Tag: Leadership

National Mentoring Month and I am a Mentor Day are here

In the US, January is National Mentoring Month, and January 11th is “I am a mentor day”. I am excited to write this post for this day!

Starting from when I received a lot of mentoring from cherished and loved ones, including my sixth-grade teacher, the Late “Master Williams”, when I didn’t even know what mentoring is, I have really cherished the activity. I continue to seek out mentors and also try to give back myself. If you are on this page reading this, you also appreciate it as much or more than I do!

If you read about how many industries and areas of endeavor in life, ranging from fundamental skills to cooking and the arts evolved, it was all through the art of mentoring. A lot of it was through the model of apprenticeship but has now expanded to other areas.

An Ever Expanding Landscape

Resplendent

The world of mentoring is ever-expanding, ranging from formal models to informal relationships, short-term to long-term, individual to group sessions, and more! And yet, I would venture, we have only begun to scratch the surface. Clearly, not enough people engage in mentorship, on either end of the relationship and that needs to change. People can lead better lives, enjoy enriched careers and become role models themselves creating an enduring chain that makes society all the better. Very briefly, let us discuss this.

Mutual Benefits

One of the pillars of mentoring is that the exchange happens through the lens of past experiences – the gathering of wisdom. While knowledge itself is forever becoming easier and easier to access through the seemingly endless books, videos, and other forms of absorption and dispersal, wisdom comes through experience. Now, one might accidentally assume this is unidirectional, but this would be a mistake for more than one reason.

  1. Personal Growth: Whatever stage of your career you are in, when yourmentees ask you incisive questions and you dig deep to answer those questions and provide them with solutions, suggestions, roadmaps, or ideas, you grow with them. You may then be able to go back to your own work and alter it for the better, you may be able to mentor your own team or other mentees based on the enrichment you experience. You can write blogs, go on podcasts, and write books, the possibilities are nearly endless.
  2. Reverse Mentoring: As a novel concept, reverse mentoring is taking its place in many places from informal to formal career engagements and the board room. Since the very act of mentoring draws from experiences, when one looks at people who come various ages, races, backgrounds and other factors, those experiences can be exchanged. Suddenly, a Gen X-er is able to absorb the way a Gen Z-er sees things. This helps everyone benefit in the workplace, in the boardroom, do a better job at Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and beyond.
  3. Satisfaction and Enrichment: Helping any number of people advance in life or careers through the lens of mentoring helps us gain immense satisfaction and enrichment. This has been true in my case at least. Many of us want to feel useful. What better way to experience this than by lending your wisdom to help someone solve a problem, or complete a body of work, or just through the free exchange of ideas?
  4. A hiring pipeline: Now this might not always be a pathway, but it would work in some cases. The best hires happen through one’s network. In that sense, if you were mentoring people in the early stages of their career, or in the end stages of formative education, a sense of mutual familiarity develops. This can allow one to easily hire team members, with a sense of confidence in their fit and performance, the former being so much more important! But, don’t forget this also works both ways – the mentor themselves can be a candidate at some point, and the mentees may be able to make the right introductions.

So what is holding you back? 

There are a few things that hold many people from mentoring:

  1. “I don’t think I have anything to contribute”: Imposter syndrome and accompanying emotions and beliefs make several folks think they have nothing to offer. On the one hand, this is rarely true, and on the other hand, mentees would be so thrilled to spend time with you. At a minimum, you can match and try. Most of the time I suspect people would be surprised, at how their experience and knowledge are valued by mentees. So once again, give it a try.
  2. Time – There is never enough time. Yes, it is easy to say make time. But difficult as it might be, thinking about all the advantages that we gain, making time is very important. Mentoring doesn’t take a whole lot of time. Most interactions never last more than a few hours a month, if that.
  3. Guidance and Resources: Of course, we can all use a helping hand. Guidance is available in the form of books, articles, blogs, videos, podcasts, and more from an immense number of sources, such as mentoring.org, alumni groups, libraries, and others. Peruse the resources and get going!  Someone out there is expecting your generosity!

References:

  1. Cover Image: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-men-having-conversation-935949/
  2. Persons shaking hands: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-men-shaking-hands-3182831/
  3. Image of branches: https://www.stockvault.net/photo/165258/green-branch
  4. Young and Old Person: https://www.pexels.com/photo/fashion-man-people-woman-8527069/
  5. Image of Cornucopia: https://pixabay.com/photos/cornucopia-fruit-thanksgiving-3719247/
  6. Thinking Lady: https://pixabay.com/photos/african-black-woman-model-profile-5505598/

On delegation – a fundamental skill for leaders

Leadership is a rather unique string of cheese. Of course, this is perhaps not the place to start the discussion on whether you are born a leader or can be taught how to be one. Let us assume that both are possible. Leaders can still use some lessons or refreshers on the various aspects that compose the whole. And that brings us to delegation.

A rather rare skillset

I do differentiate managers and leaders. That said, both clans if you will, lack delegation skills. There are all manners of delegation issues out there. Few managers/leaders think they have the right delegation skills, and most companies are concerned about delegation skills among their leaders, and yet few, if any, offer training. Read more in references [1] and [2].

Don’t drink and drive, er..

Of course, once there is enough stress on delegation, one may choose to delegate, but if that person is also a micromanager, then the whole thing gets worse. Micromanagers are NOT leaders. They are the scourge of society. And if they simply pretend to delegate, then constantly breathe down the necks of their reports, the consequences can be devastating for teams and entire organizations.

Thus delegation must be done appropriately, taking into account the skills of the team members, the resources handed to them, and most importantly the level of empowerment and guidance they receive.

How do you teach leaders to delegate?

If you read books, listen to podcasts and watch conference presentations, you hear enough about how leaders should learn to delegate. However, that is easier said than done, especially for managers. And nothing can help power-hungry managers who are only interested in lip service. However, there are a few avenues that will teach you skills of delegation.

  1. Military Service

In various branches of service, in well-run militaries across the planet, delegation skills are drilled into service members, pun unintended. That is one of the reasons why, in certain settings, ex-service members make great leaders, as they are able to translate and effectively moderate military discipline into leadership in civilian settings. Of course, this is not an option available to those who do not serve, and not all those who serve turn into effective leaders.

2. Business School

I never went to business school, but I am certain business schools, classes, lectures, and case studies are a good way to learn anything to do with leadership, so clearly this is an avenue. However, we know that reading about something and actually managing to reduce it to practice can be quite different from each other. Plus, it would be a bit challenging to tell someone to go to business school and spend several thousand dollars for the possibility that they might learn about delegation.

3. The school of hard knocks

Almost anything is best learned by doing. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that one of the best ways to learn how to be a good leader can come from consciously and deliberately learning to hire and trust team members, allowing them to take on small and large programs, projects, tasks, and responsibilities. This involves a high level of experimentation, but for the motivated leader, presents immense opportunities.

The best way to get started with ad hoc delegation is to engage in the following:

3.1 Discuss delegation with your team, both in group and individual settings, and gather their inputs, desires, and wishes for guidance and limitations.

3.2 Start with the right amount of delegation. An intern can take on a few tasks, a junior engineer can take on a project and a senior engineer or manager can take on an entire program! Make sure you get their buy-ins before turning things over!

3.3 Keep in touch, but keep trust. If you have done other things well, you have a team that innately wishes to succeed, with members cherishing both individual and group success. Therefore, it is quite possible that they would take delight in the programs, projects, and tasks they have now taken over.

3.4 Fix problems, provide resources and change things up if and when the experiments fail.

3.5 Have closing meetings for programs and projects, check off on tasks, and share learnings with the team to keep things moving into the future.

3.6 Keep talking to your mentors and peers on how they delegate and lead their teams to success.

3.7 This is not a final step, but a guideline. Giving up complete ownership is hard. Very hard. But you have to constantly remind yourself that this is how you get the team to the finish line and create a new generation of leaders. Remember, people tend to imbibe good practices, and when you promote your own team members to lead their own teams, delegation will be that much easier for them, because of you! That should be motivation enough!

4. Starting them young!

When you are training leaders of the future, you might give them their chops as early as possible. I know this from personal experience. When I was 16, my parents decided to start a textiles company at home, in the upstairs unit. This became my first entrepreneurial venture, and my first dip into leadership as well. I hired a supervisor to manage my 40 or so employees, and had her lead the charge, of an almost fully women-driven company, while I simultaneously attended college.

Recently, I had an intern work with me at a prior employer. This intern, is now an engineer in my team. So, when we brought on a highly driven high school intern to the team, I paired the engineer with the intern. I even reminded the engineer how I doled out tasks to him when he was an intern. We have had a smooth sailing journey so far, and I am almost certain the engineer now has a good foundation on delegation, and perhaps so does the high school intern!

Conclusion

Giving up ownership might feel counterintuitive. Not doing so, is in fact counterintuitive. Learn to pass on ownership at the right levels to the right people, follow up with resources and guidelines. Be honest, receive feedback well, learn from your mistakes, and then lather, rinse repeat.

With the appropriate amount of delegation, you will become a true force multiplier!

References:

  1. https://mailchimp.com/courier/article/delegating-work-effectively/#:~:text=An%20often%2Dquoted%20statistic%20from,not%20enough%20people%20do%20well.
  2. https://hbr.org/2012/07/why-arent-you-delegating
  3. Featured Image Credit: https://www.flaticon.com/free-icons/people
  4. Military Icon: https://www.flaticon.com/free-icon/military_2614734?k=1648450681571
  5. School Bus Icon: https://graphicsurf.com/download/2596/
  6. Classroom Icon: https://www.flaticon.com/free-icon/presentation_1064587
  7. Bull’s Eye Icon: https://www.flaticon.com/free-icon/bullseye_124160