Mentoring 101

John C. Maxwell

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781400220755
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Mentoring & Coaching
• Index: Business

John C. Maxwell shows how the best leaders in any organization learned to be successful by having a good mentor.

Through this essential and easy-to-read reference book, international leadership expert John C. Maxwell gives you the bottom line on mentoring--what it is, why you should do it, and how you can do it most effectively.

In Mentoring 101, Maxwell guides you in the art of mentoring by explaining:

• how to choose the right person to mentor,
• how to create the right environment for leaders to thrive and grow,
• how to help people become better,
• and how to overcome the most intimidating hurdle of all: getting started.

What if you spent your entire life achieving but never shared your wisdom with anyone else?

Mentoring is the key to creating a lasting legacy, and Mentoring 101 is your personalized key to seeing that journey through.

PART I

GETTING READY TO MENTOR OTHERS

1

WHAT DO I NEED TO KNOW BEFORE I START?

If you want to succeed as a mentor, first seek to understand yourself and others.

Most people who desire success focus almost entirely on themselves, not others, when they start to make the journey. They usually think in terms of what they can get—in position, power, prestige, money, and perks. But that’s not the way to become truly successful. To do that, you have to give to others. As Douglas M. Lawson said, “We exist temporarily through what we take, but we live forever through what we give.”

That’s why it’s so essential to focus on raising others to a higher level. And we can do that with people from every area of our lives—at work and home, in church and the clubhouse. That’s evidently what Texas representative Wright Patman did, according to a story told by Senator Paul Simon. He said that Patman died at age eighty-two while serving in the U.S. House of Representatives. At his funeral, an older woman who lived in his district was heard to have said, “He rose up mighty high, but he brung us all up with him.”

WHY MANY PEOPLE DON’T MENTOR OTHERS

If mentoring others is such a rewarding calling, why doesn’t everyone do it? One reason is that it takes work. But there are also many others. Here are a few of the most common ones.

INSECURITY

Virginia Arcastle commented, “When people are made to feel secure and important and appreciated, it will no longer be necessary for them to whittle down others in order to seem bigger in comparison.” That’s what insecure people tend to do—make themselves look better at others’ expense.

Truly successful people, on the other hand, raise others up. And they don’t feel threatened by the thought of having others become more successful and move to a higher level. They are growing and striving for their potential; they aren’t worried about having someone replace them. They’re nothing like the executive who wrote a memo to the personnel director saying, “Search the organization for an alert, aggressive young man who could step into my shoes—and when you find him, fire him.” Raising up others is a successful person’s joy.

EGO

Some people’s egos are so huge that they have to be either the bride at the wedding or the corpse at the funeral. They think other people exist only to serve them in some way or another. Adolf Hitler was like that. According to Robert Waite, when Hitler was searching for a chauffeur, he interviewed thirty candidates for the job. He selected the shortest man in the group and kept him as his personal driver for the rest of his life—even though the man required special blocks under the driver’s seat so that he could see over the steering wheel.¹ Hitler used others to make himself appear bigger and better than he really was. A person consumed with himself never considers spending time raising others up.

INABILITY TO DISCERN PEOPLE’S “SUCCESS SEEDS”

I believe every person has the seed of success inside. Too many people can’t find it in themselves, let alone in others, and as a result, they don’t reach their potential. But many do find that seed, and chances are, you are one of those people. The good news is that once you are able to find it in yourself, you’re better able to do the same with others. When you do, it benefits both of you because you and the person you help will be able to fulfill the purposes for which each was born.

The ability to find another’s seed of success takes commitment, diligence, and a genuine desire to focus on others. You have to look at the person’s gifts, temperament, passions, successes, joys, and opportunities. And once you find that seed, you need to fertilize it with encouragement and water it with opportunity. If you do, the person will blossom before your eyes.

WRONG CONCEPT OF SUCCESS

True success is knowing your purpose, growing to reach your maximum potential, and sowing seeds to benefit others. The average person doesn’t know that. He or she is scrambling to arrive at a destination or acquire more possessions than the next-door neighbors.

Fred Smith said: “Some of us tend to think, I could have been a success, but I never had the opportunity. I wasn’t born into the right family, or I didn’t have the money to go to the best school. But when we measure success by the extent we’re using what we’ve received, it eliminates that frustration.” And one of the most vital aspects of how we’re using what we received comes in the area of helping others. As Cullen Hightower remarked, “A true measure of your worth includes all the benefits others have gained from your success.”

LACK OF TRAINING

The final reason many people don’t raise up the people around them is that they don’t know how to do it. Mentoring others isn’t something most people learn in school. Even if you went to college to become a teacher, you were probably trained to disseminate information to a group, not to come alongside a single person, pour into her life, and raise her to a higher level.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW AS YOU START

Raising people to a higher level and helping them be successful involve more than giving them information or skills. If that were not the case, every new employee would go from trainee to success as soon as he understood how to do his job; every child would be successful whenever she learned something new at school. But success doesn’t automatically follow knowledge. The process is complicated because you’re working with people. However, understanding some basic concepts about people opens the door to your ability to develop others. For example, remind yourself that

EVERYONE WANTS TO FEEL WORTHWHILE

Donald Laird said, “Always help people increase their own self-esteem. Develop your skill in making other people feel important. There is hardly a higher compliment you can pay an individual than helping him be useful and to find satisfaction from his usefulness.” When a person doesn’t feel good about himself, he will never believe he is successful, no matter what he accomplishes. But a person who feels worthwhile is ripe for success.

EVERYONE NEEDS AND RESPONDS TO ENCOURAGEMENT

One of my favorite quotes comes from industrialist Charles Schwab, who said, “I have yet to find the man, however exalted his station, who did not do better work and put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than under a spirit of criticism.” If you desire to raise another person up, then you need to become one of her staunchest supporters. People can tell when you don’t believe in them.

PEOPLE ARE NATURALLY MOTIVATED

I’ve found that people are naturally motivated. If you doubt that, just watch toddlers soon after they learn to walk. They’re into everything. They have natural curiosity, and you can’t get them to stay still. I believe that innate sense of motivation continues to exist in adults, but for too many people it has been beaten down by lack of support, busyness, stress, bad attitudes, lack of appreciation, scarce resources, poor training, or faulty communication. To get people excited about growing to their potential, you need to remotivate them. Once you help them overcome the old things that knocked them down, they often motivate themselves.

PEOPLE BUY INTO THE PERSON BEFORE BUYING INTO THEIR LEADERSHIP

Many unsuccessful people who try to lead others have the mistaken belief that people will follow them because their cause is good. But that’s not the way leadership works. People will follow you only when they believe in you. That principle applies even when you’re offering to develop other people and raise them to a higher level.

The more you understand people, the greater your chance of success in mentoring. And if you have highly developed people skills and genuinely care about others, the process will probably come to you naturally.

2

HOW DO I ADOPT A MENTOR’S MIND-SET?

Mentoring is who you are as much as what you do.

Whether you have a natural gift for interacting positively with people or you have to really work at it, you are capable of mentoring others and lifting them to a higher level. You can help them develop a road map for success and go on the journey with you as long as you keep growing as a person and a leader.

THINK LIKE A MENTOR

Here are the steps you will need to take in order to become the kind of mentor you are capable of being:

1. MAKE PEOPLE DEVELOPMENT YOUR TOP PRIORITY

If you want to succeed in developing people, you have to make it a top priority. It’s always easier to dismiss people than to devel...