Leader Mentoring

Find, Inspire, and Cultivate Great Leaders

Michael Shenkman

• Publisher: Career Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781601630124
• eBook ISBN: 9781601638274
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Mentoring & Coaching
• Index: Business

A compilation of moving stories and helpful guidance discusses how to become a successful mentor and leader while looking at the benefits mentoring has to all parties involved.

CHAPTER ONE

CHOOSING THE CANDIDATE

When beginning a new program, the first major question we must face is this: Whom do we mentor? You’re probably thinking, “Oh, that’s easy to answer. Of course you want to mentor those who are in line for senior executive positions.” But surprise! I have found, throughout the many years I have been doing this, that people in line for top executive management roles are not necessarily the best leader-mentoring candidates. True, potential leaders have probably attained some level of managerial success, by dint of their energy, insight, and concern. But blanket assignment of a certain level of managers in an organization to a mentoring program has not been shown to necessarily yield a high proportion of successful candidates in a leader-mentoring program.

Instead, a CEO or an HR executive chooses candidates one by one. Candidates who are well known to the organization are chosen. Candidates have earned the recognition of having some kind of special quality that resonates with employees; they are not chosen just because of their ranking in the organization. The people selecting candidates are aware that leaders have to be found, recognized, and identified, one by one, wherever they do their work.

“Well, then,” the thinking continues, “you would mentor people who have the drive and determination to get ahead, who make things happen, but need their rough edges smoothed a bit.” Actually, these people are probably best suited to coaching not mentoring, for reasons that I’ll discuss in a moment. But here let me say simply that leading isn’t only about driving toward success. Sometimes the ones doing most of the driving are the least leaderly.

Although it is certainly true that leaders have an abundance of energy that we recognize as “drive,” sometimes the ones doing the most driving simply know how to use the system, capitalizing on an ability to manipulate it to their advantage and then climbing up the ladder. True leaders have no interest in doing that. Sometimes, because of what they are committed to, they even do things that seem to be (or definitely are) contrary to short-term gain, and even contrary to their own self-interest. Think back to Dan, from our initial story. If Dan was driving toward “success,” with the ambition of climbing the ladder, why would he ever have risked trying that impossible project a second time?

THE BIG PROBLEM

Here is the BIG problem in choosing candidates for a leader-mentoring program: candidates who show up well for managerial promotions may not show up as well as a candidate for leader mentoring.

The situation we often encounter is paradoxical. Very often, the (necessary) managerial and hierarchical structures of an organization have constrained exactly the behaviors and aspirations we need from leaders. Managerial constraints have so modified and tamped down behaviors, so supported conformity and compliance, that it soon becomes impossible to know who are the ones who can make things different. Were they driven out of the organization? Would they trust executives who now say they want nonconforming ideas, challenging practices, and new bursts of creativity?

The people whom the executives are now looking for, and had previously overlooked, need and merit a different kind of recognition of their abilities and, indeed, of their spirits.

So, given that situation, let’s ask our question again: How does one recognize the candidate most likely to benefit from professional leader mentoring?

To illustrate an answer, let me tell you a story about one kind of wrenching change for which organizations have to plan, and no less inevitably endure: succession.

The Question From Out of the Blue

The board meeting had gone well. Hal’s plans for the quarter were on track; the strategic plan for the next 18 months still made sense. Hal was feeling good.

Then, from the other end of the table, Hal’s closest friend on the board, Dave, raises his hand. “Dave,” says Hal, nonchalantly pointing his way to acknowledge his friend’s request to speak.

“Hal, great job today, really. I’d say we’re all ready for a drink...” Laughter from the group, though Hal suddenly feels less at ease, though he is not sure why. Dave continues, “But I was just wondering: Who is in the wings to succeed you? Even you won’t live forever, and you’ll probably want to hit the golf course at some point when you can still walk.” More laughs. “So who is waiting in the wings to lead this company?”

Hal later told me that this was the motivating incident that led to him seeking the kind of professional mentoring services my firm offers. I recall the rest of his story this way.

At that moment, Hal’s mind went blank. But hanging on to his composure and command style, he responded to his friend, “Dave, great question. You know, I’ve been thinking about that....”

“You planning to leave, Hal?” asks another member, half-joking. Again more laughs.

“No, but, you know, planning my succession is a big part of my job too. I’ve been thinking about it more and more lately. I guess it’s becoming a higher priority.”

Yes, succession planning is the CEO’s job, but one that is often put off until another day. “After all, there are other, more immediate things to do,” the executive assures himself. And of course, any executive who thinks this way is absolutely right. Managing businesses in complex, competitive environments is demanding, especially when it comes to efficiency, productivity, and innovation. Each one of these is an absorbing, relentless, unforgiving challenge.

Yet, as Hal looked around the room, at the senior executives who had joined him in this pivotal board meeting, he realized how little convinced he was that there truly was a successor among them. It wasn’t that he hadn’t thought about it. And, in fact, he had actually taken a few small steps toward that end by going out to dinner with each one of his top execs. Still, he remained unsure that any of the individuals in the room were up to the task of taking over for him if he was hit by that proverbial bus.

Hal’s situation is far from unusual. Ample lip service is often paid to succession planning, especially in the top ranks of an organization, but too often it is not taken seriously enough to inspire action. Although executives don’t pooh-pooh the idea of succession planning, they don’t quite get to it either, what with all the tumult and distraction of a normal business day. Even when time is found to pursue the matter, by going to dinner one-on-one or taking time for more relaxed conversations with leader potentials, conversations in these cases typically are restricted to the most unrevealing subjects: problems with meeting the numbers, problems with this or that employee, sports, perhaps, or some other (safe) current event in the news or TV programs. Moreover, in the typical one-on-one performance review, there’s usually so much angling going on for decisions about bonuses, raises, promotions, or disciplinary issues, that a conversation about leading, and growing as a leader, hardly ever happens at all.

Thus, despite all the good intentions, few occasions seem to yield the kinds of insights that a Hal can use to detect nascent leadership, or that will signal optimal choices for succession.

The Hidden Qualities of the Budding Leader

So, looking at our question, it is apparent that there is nothing “easy” about its answer at all. The fact is that the best leader candidates don’t necessarily present themselves in the same way managerial candidates for promotion do. Choosing a candidate for mentoring requires a different kind of attention to, and interaction with, perspective candidates than does choosing effective managers. The call to leading comes in subtle ways, and thus good prospects are missed. Sometimes the prospects themselves do not necessarily recognize that the drive to lead is taking shape in their lives.

Going back to Hal, one prospect to succeed him was Susan. Hal confided to me that he felt Susan took good care of her people and she was great performer—“a real charmer in meetings,” was the way he put it. But Hal wondered if Susan wasn’t too “soft.” Did she have that extra edge, he asked, to drive people over the top to success?

In the course of my own conversations with Susan as I mentored her, she once exclaimed: “I’d never say this to Hal, but sometimes I just wonder, well, whether I shouldn’t be doing more. And what bothers me is that I don’t know what that is. It’s nothing about the job, or the people, or my boss. I have nothing to complain about. So what could it be? It’s driving me crazy.

“It’s as though there are times in my work when I feel I should say things to people, or jump into their problems in ways that I never felt before. But then I’ll ignore the feeling, and go back to my job,” she concluded.

With all of these factors in play, I felt that Susan was on the brink, teetering on the edge of moving to a new level of engagement with her world. But sometimes this type of question does come from being “soft,” as Hal would say. Or it might come from a lack of imagination, or even burnout. Hal is a hard-driving executive. If she had asked that question of him, his suspicions about her “softness” would no doubt have been confirmed. But, as her mentor, I could hear a different concern in her question, reflecting her own impulse to bring something more to the situation than she had in the past. Susan felt highly anxious, and filled with a sense of obligation and desire.

When executives ask, “Who are my potential leaders?” they typically look at everyone in their immediate circle, who are frantically scampering around trying to please them by managing well and getting things done on time, below budget, no matter what glass gets broken (or which people get hurt) along the way. Most top executives are determined to drive results now, for this quarter’s reports, to keep costs down, to keep people focused on their tasks. It’s a system-driven, justified, even sanctified imperative. As a result, no matter what their humanistic inclinations might be, executives aren’t trained, hired, promoted, and awarded bonuses to notice those who quietly, with some struggle and loss of their bearings, ask open-ended and “weak” questions such as, “Shouldn’t I be doing more?”

MISSED AMID THE CRUNCH. Susan’s story is one of being missed, passed over for recognition in the scrambling for one of the few positions left available in the hierarchical ascent, positions diminishing fast in most corporate environments today. But this is not the fault of Hal or Susan’s other superiors. The fact is, given the demands of managerial success, Susan, and people similar to her, often hide their real concerns, withholding insights and constraining passions that might otherwise be brought to the surface and revealed. Susan’s vague feelings of disquiet may typically be voiced to a friend, but surely not to the boss!

And who would be most likely to recommend Susan for promotion, or to be included in a mentoring program, or in line for consideration as a successor? That person would likely be that very same boss in whom she is afraid of confiding. In larger organizations, a person such as Susan might be fortunate enough to have an HR person or overseeing manager who is sensitive to the hidden qualities of aspiring leaders (versus ambitious managers). Or he might see the qualities of the aspiring leader along with those neon signs of ambition.

Why do leader qualities suffer at the expense of raw ambition in so many organizations? To begin with, think about the competitive demands facing profit-making, or revenue-dependent organizations. Our business and organizational culture values speed and efficiency. Conflict! But mentoring is slow and meandering.

Managers are expected, at some level, to be “macho,” pushing people, or “motivating” them, to work faster and harder, and bring higher-level skills to the greater complexity of the tasks at hand. Managers, tied to their proficiency in process improvement, distinguish themselves by their self-confidence and their self-certainty about their prowess. They also tend to protect the knowledge they have, and keep it to themselves, so as to make it work for them and them alone. Conflict! But mentoring is a process of being open, and even vulnerable.

This “soft” side is the last thing looked for in managers. What a field day might be had on someone who admitted having these kinds of feelings. Such feelings thus are driven deep underground—in a hurry! Remember Dan back on the balcony? Conflict! But mentoring is a highly emotional opening-up to both strengths and vulnerabilities.

This “doing” quality of our culture extends especially to upper-echelon executives. Their stock in trade is to be “too busy,” and to have “too much on their plates.” Conflict! But mentoring is an activity of conversation, often requiring leaders to make available some “Q2” time, as one leader puts it—that is, quality time, time to contemplate the situation, think through options, slowly navigate the communications process, and think about their own status and role. Another executive told me, “If I sit in my office reading or thinking, people will think I am doing nothing. That’s suicide around here.”

“Hiding” one’s leadership ability, then, is something that has to be dealt with even prior to considering selecting mentees. We’ll touch on this factor later. In advance, however, we can say this: Potential leaders are less likely to hide in well-led, as opposed to well-managed, organizations. With examples of leading all around her, with conversations about leading, and encouragement to step into that role with little risk, Susan would not have hidden her questions or abilities.

But now let’s illuminate some of the other barriers to an organization’s ability to recognize candidates for leader mentoring.

Aversions to Leading

When I first conceived of my Arch of Leadership mentoring program, I began with an assumption that “leading” was a completely positive thing. After all, what word do we hear tossed about in organizational life more than leadership? Communication, maybe, power, maybe, but certainly leadership is right up there. So it honestly never dawned on me that offering a program about leading wouldn’t be snapped up by everyone in a position to pay the bill.

Surprise!

Saying the word lead to someone, it turns out, is like throwing a four-letter word at them. To many in a program with leadership in the title, the word gave the impression of an accusation of their inferiority and failure. To evaluate a person’s performance on a scale assessing whether or not they were “leaders” was to put them at a professional disadvantage. Who could say whether they were leading or not (for all the reasons we cited, for example)? Isn’t this a very subjective thing?

And from the other side of the table, the evaluating executive could often be just as insecure about what was meant by leading.

At the conference I mentioned at the outset, this very thing came up. In talking about leading, such concepts as risk-taking, caring for people, and “having heart” kept coming up as distinguishing characteristics of leading. “I am doing my evaluations now,” said one of the managers in the group. “I don’t recall seeing a lot of questions in there about having heart or risk-taking,” he said. Nods all around. And silence. And the attendees at this conference had been chosen for their abilities as leaders!

How often could this scene be repeated in organizations everywhere?

In how many ways has leading become a dirty word? Here are a few. I mention these factors, dwelling on the negative, so to speak, because people who harbor attitudes s...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Foreword
• PREFACE
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE - CHOOSING THE CANDIDATE
• CHAPTER TWO - THE OUTLINE FOR MENTORING A LEADER
• CHAPTER THREE - BEING MENTORED
• CHAPTER FOUR - WHO MENTORS
• CHAPTER FIVE - MENTORING IN ACTION
• CHAPTER SIX - THE “PROFESSIONAL” FACTOR: GREATER, NOT SMARTER
• CHAPTER SEVEN - THE RIGHT ROLE FOR LEADER MENTORING
• CONCLUSION
• POSTSCRIPT
• APPENDIX A - MENTORING ALONG THE PATH
• APPENDIX B - TERMS USED IN THE ARCH OF LEADERSHIP MENTORING ROGRAM
• APPENDIX C - WORKBOOK
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR