Professional Leader Mentoring: The Right Leader Development Resource For Our Times

By: Michael Shenkman
Submitted: 2008-08-19 13:35:44
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Are our organizations’ leaders doing the best they can to develop the next generation of leaders?  From my thirty years as a consultant to organizations of all kinds, I have for you what may be a surprising answer.

Although many organizations do invest in leader development, they stop short of offering the kinds of developmental services that truly address what we need from our leaders.  In short, most of the investment I have seen goes toward developing performance and production skills that focus on managerially short output. Certainly these skills are needed by every organization, but merely improving these skills falls far short of what we need from our leaders.

In these anxious days of intense competition and rising costs of doing business, we need, instead, leaders who strive not for efficiency of operation, but who offer, demonstrate, and demand a commitment to excellence in all aspects of their organizational lives.

A couple of years ago, for example, in a talk before the Human Resources Planning Society, Robert W. Eichinger, co-founder (with Michael M. Lombardo) of Lominger Limited, Inc, made a case for how far our approach to developing leaders falls short from this goal. His research identified 67 skills and competencies that contribute to managerial and executive success. The Lominger database holds over a decade’s worth of tens of thousands of ratings from its 360-degree feedback tool which assesses how managers and executives actually fare at the 67 competencies. Top skills cited were those that most managers were rated to be best at; the bottom rungs were filled by those which managers and executives were rated lowest at.

The top ten skills that managers believe they are best at, as cited by Robert Eichinger, are:

(1)  Intellectual Horsepower

(2) Functional/Technical Skills

(3) Integrity/Trust

(4) Ethics/Values

(5) Action Oriented

(6) Perseverance

(7) Customer Focus

(8) Standing Alone

(9) Drive for Results

(10) Technical Learning.

On the other end of the scale, those skills that managers find themselves to be least effective at include, working from the bottom up:

(67) Developing People (dead last!)

(66) Personal Learning

(65) Understanding Others

(64) Dealing with Paradox

(63) Confronting Direct Reports

(62) Managing Vision & Purpose

(61) Personal Disclosure

Here are a few more near the bottom:

(57) Directing Others

(56) Motivating Others

(54) Self Knowledge

(53) Building Effective Teams

(49) Creativity

(47) Dealing with Ambiguity

What does this tell us about the current skill sets of our executives and managers? Well, we definitely want them to be able to perform well at those actions at the top of the list but what about the items at the bottom? Aren't these important qualities for leaders to have as well?

When I have asked people to identify the leaders in their lives who have mattered most, who have directly effected their lives in such a way that they developed into a leader themselves, I find that they never cite the qualities at the top of the list (except for integrity and values). Instead they always describe someone who noticed and developed their skills and who listened to them. So the skills they cite as most in evidence of the leaders who have affected their lives are the ones at the bottom of the list. And yet, these are the very skills that are not emphasized in most development efforts.

The  good news is there are definite ways in which these skills can be reinforced and nurtured in prospective leaders. There is one kind of interaction that is specifically devoted to it, designed specifically to foster this kind of development: leader mentoring.

A Different Motivation

In starting to think about undertaking a professional leader-mentoring program inside a company, an executive has to rethink the motivations for investing in a “development” program.  The usual motivation for starting some kind of organizational or personal development program is to improve the performance and efficiency of key people.  Occasionally, motivations for development come from other needs:  the need to retain key people, the need to demonstrate a concern with development, or in the case of attending a conference, to do networking with like-minded employees.  In other words, to justify the expense of a coach or an absence of an executive to attend a conference, there needs to be an immediate pay-off to the bottom line.

These criteria fall away when it comes to deciding to invest in a leader mentoring program: The benefits aren’t immediately apparent as leader mentoring is primarily intended to uncover, unleash, and release exceptional talents and energies. So if your organization is facing new challenges, or if it’s facing perpetually difficult ones that seem to be overwhelming the status quo of organizational functioning, then leader mentoring will provide a solution.

Where do we find leader mentoring being offered to employees and aspiring leaders?  We find such mentoring being taken seriously and seen as an important investment in well-led organizations. Leaders in these types of organizations realize how they have cultivated mentors throughout their lives and thus they realize this is no superfluous relationship.  It is only through good mentors that continual personal and professional learning is encouraged and that opens new vistas. They know that their own commitment to leading came originally from such a relationship. Thus, wherever leaders may lead, mentoring is encouraged and done with conscientious deliberateness, planning and professional guidance.

Sometimes leaders complain that they don’t have the time for this kind of thing. Such leaders need to be reminded that leading is a creative discipline not far from that of the arts. Any artist has to practice, and learn, and engage with teachers and wise, learned people if his/her art is not to lapse into technique or mass production. A leader, in short, has to do the work of leading all the while continuing learning.  It is mentoring, not skill training alone, that fosters the kind of discipline, and dedication to learning and attention that is required to develop into a bold leader, one who is authentic, engaged, and effective.

What Organizations Promote Mentoring?

Which companies will most successfully implement leader mentoring? They typically retain most or all of the following characteristics:

1) The CEO must truly place a premium value on developing the organization’s leaders and must be willing to make a real investment in this.  That means spending money, taking the time, and allowing people to do the work. Unleashing the leader potential of top prospects in an organization is a big deal. To be successful, a CEO has to be of large spirit and imagination if leader prospects are to take advantage of opportunities to lead, learn, and grow as they arise. This means opportunities to fail as well as to celebrate successes—do not be threatened by opportunities!

2) The HR department has license to actively recognize, and then make the investment to develop leaders. An HR department with a mandate to do this helps to choose candidates, keeping the program moving administratively and keeps it integrated into the organization’s larger picture of personnel development.

3) People who go through our program must open themselves to introspection and to making real changes. It’s not so much that a leader mentoring process mandates that leaders do new things, although that may be necessary, but rather that leader mentoring helps people realize that they must value their actions, decisions and risks differently. Mentoring helps aspiring leaders shift their attention when necessary from technology to people, and/or from knowledge to intuition and sensitivity.

Professional Mentoring 

Now let’s go back to that concern that executives raise about not having the time to do this.  In today’s world, where pressures of time and money, and demands by boards of directors, regulators and constituents all turn the heat up, that is a very real concern.  For those who care about mentoring, this creates a conflict: do I meet immediate demands, or do I do what is necessary for the long term?

Into the breach comes a new development resource:  professional leader mentoring. Just as two decades ago executive coaching arose to meet the demands of companies who had to cut bloat and improve performance. Now professional mentors are offering their expertise in unleashing the commitment and creative focus needed for success today.

A professional mentor offers these important qualifications for defining effective programs:

·      A program focused on the life of the leader, not on skills.

·      Dedicated attention of a professional mentor to the mentee – including complete confidentiality – and a schedule of meeting dates, goals for each meeting, and a set number of such meetings.

·      A group component that brings mentees together to help each other develop their respective commitments to leading.

·      A consistent, curriculum-based program that can be used to cultivate leading among many of the company’s aspiring leaders at one time.

·      A cadre of certified mentors who can deliver the kind of transformation sought from such an investment.

·      A means of assessing the success of each mentee, as well as the program as a whole.

·      Distinctive mentoring programs for people at different stages in their life of leading.

With these criteria in mind, any leader who genuinely cares about developing leaders for his/her organization, and for the health and well-being of our society at large, is able to deliver the resources essential to implement this all-important, too often neglected job.

Article source: Expert Articles