Leader Mentoring

Bibliography “Shenkman’s thinking and mentoring strategies provided a powerful framework for designing a master of architecture program committed to the creation of leaders within the profession. We base our master’s curriculum on Shenkman’s philosophy of leader mentoring. The practicing architects participating in the program universally feel his insights have heightened their effectiveness in promoting change within their firms and their profession.” —Curt Lamb, AIA, PhD Executive Director, Education Initiatives, Boston Architectural College “I have seen Shenkman’s idea of leader mentoring develop from its inception. After 10 years of experience, fine-tuning, and consolidating its approach, it is now honed to a fine point. The good managers who are selected to go into this program do emerge among our organization’s most trusted, respected, and effective leaders.” —Charles E. Hoffman President and CEO, Covad Communications, Inc. 1 “As a former manager who worked for 17 years on the creative edges at Intel Corporation, I learned the importance of “roadmaps” to the success of an engineering and technology-driven company. Mr. Shenkman has developed a roadmap that uses mentoring as a vehicle for mentors aspiring leaders in the technical environment. The result is that for some it will rock their world, and for others open up wonderful new possibilities. None will be left unchanged. And, in a technology world, change is everything.” —Barbara Brazil Manager, Public Affairs (retired), Intel Corporation 2 Leader Mentoring Leader Mentoring Find, Inspire, and Cultivate Great Leaders Michael H. Shenkman, PhD The Career Press, Inc. Franklin Lakes, NJ Copyright © 2008 by Michael Shenkman All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher, The Career Press. LEADER MENTORING EDITED BY KARA REYNOLDS TYPESET BY MICHAEL FITZGIBBON Cover design by The DesignWorks Group Printed in the U.S.A. by Book-mart Press To order this title, please call toll-free 1-800-CAREER-1 (NJ and Canada: 201-848-0310) to order using VISA or MasterCard, or for further information on books from Career Press. The Career Press, Inc., 3 Tice Road, PO Box 687, Franklin Lakes, NJ 07417 www.careerpress.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shenkman, Michael H. Leader mentoring : find, inspire, and cultivate great leaders / by Michael Shenkman. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60163-012-4 1. Mentoring in business. 2. Leadership. I. Title. HF5385.S56 2008 658.4’092--dc 2007046517 Bibliography 5 Dedication To my father, always my first mentor; and to my mother, who listened. 6 Leader Mentoring Bibliography 7 Contents Foreword Preface Introduction Leader Mentoring 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 9 13 15 33 53 73 99 119 159 8 Leader Mentoring Chapter Seven The Right Role for Leader Mentoring Conclusion The Value Proposition Postscript Appendix A Mentoring Along the Path Appendix B Terms Used in the Arch of Leadership Mentoring Program Appendix C Workbook 173 189 209 213 229 239 243 245 251 255 Notes Bibliography Index About the Author Foreword 9 Foreword By Charles E. Hoffman President, CEO, Covad Communications, Inc. I had just earned my way into my first managerial job. After meeting my new team I complained to my boss that I would not have picked any of these people. He responded that you never get to pick your own people; that’s just the way it is. Well, he was wrong. Throughout time, who you decide to hire and how you treat them has significant impact on a successful career. In the nearly 30 years since that first managerial job, I have learned a different way of looking at people, viewing them not as problems to be micromanaged, but as sources of endless opportunity. I used to say that I preferred to work with young people until I realized that my longest-tenured work colleague had just turned 60 years old. The right attributes of great employees have nothing to do with numerical age, but rather a balanced life, a young-at-heart attitude, and a willingness to accept change. Working with these dynamic people takes not only trust in human nature, but also a belief in unlimited potential. Your love for working with people cannot be faked; rather, it has to be part of who you are to be genuine. People want to be trusted with responsibility (with accountability, of course) as long as you give them the freedom to make some mistakes, and help guide them 9 10 Leader Mentoring along the way. Take the time to mentor the stars and watch out! In my experience, they will wow you with ideas and results. Extra dividends are high retention and loyalty. Treating these stars with respect also demands that you understand that their work life is not separate from their personal life. Mentoring entails helping that person realize his or her full potential, both at work and at home. I have seen numerous examples of divorces or substance abuse problems due to an imbalance between these two aspects. Early on, I went through a divorce myself, and my manager at the time could tell, at a glance, that the previous evening did not go well. Obviously, I was not an effective employee during that period of time, though I thought I was not letting it affect my work. My manager’s patience and encouragement helped to shorten that period and got me back on track. We may want to believe that everybody is a star and everyone can follow great leading. But those who cannot accept change, become complacent, or don’t want to develop themselves, are worthy of little effort. I have worked for two billionaires in my career, including one who is now acknowledged as the richest man in the world. In addition to having an amazing passion for work, his distinguishing characteristic is the ability to surround himself with superstars. This is not because he pays better, and it’s certainly not because the jobs are easy. He knew how to mentor the stars. Leaders like him have high expectations, and constantly raise the bar. Because they are constantly “at work,” they helped me be constantly at work. These great leaders became very much a part of my entire life, not just my eight-to-five life. I could see in their eyes the genuine love for developing people. I, and many others, responded and produced enthusiastically and vigorously in this environment. Foreword 11 Recruiting the right people, especially leaders, is essential for your company’s success. But mentoring them to help fulfill their dreams is the ultimate personal and professional reward. Selecting the right people and leading them smartly is important, but taking the next step and mentoring your stars can achieve passionate loyalty and awesome results. A CEO just doesn’t have time to mentor all the exciting prospects in an organization. Professional leader mentoring can fill this important gap. It multiplies and intensifies the mentoring I would personally like to do. Shenkman built his program with this intention in mind. Professional leader mentoring clearly and practically demonstrates the power of this approach. I have seen this program develop from its inception. It is now honed to such a fine point that good managers who are selected to go into this program do emerge among our organization’s most trusted, respected, and effective leaders. 12 Leader Mentoring Leader Mentoring 13 Preface I apologize to the reader in advance if, by using my company’s own materials and processes, it seems that some of what follows seems to be self-promotional. I also refer frequently to my own book, The Arch and the Path: The Life of Leading Greatly (Sandia Heights Media, 2005). Given the state of leader mentoring—that is, a state of its being nearly nonexistent—there are just precious few examples from other cases to cite. There have been many studies about leader effectiveness and what techniques work best, but none that I have found about the effect of mentors on leaders. At least I can assure the reader of this as I use our firm’s work as the basis for making our case: Our mentoring process was developed with a view toward the literature on mentoring and adult transformation (see the Bibliography). It was also developed in the field, in the course of meeting with scores of aspiring leaders. Its methodology emerged from what these exciting and daring people were asking us to help them with. Finally, it was built in contrast to more than 15 years of executive coaching—applying all the established parameters of that profession. With those qualifications in mind, let’s proceed. 13 14 Leader Mentoring Leader Mentoring 15 Introduction Leader Mentoring T he scene: a conference my company is conducting for one of our clients. Nearly 30 people—senior managers, directors, and scientists—have gathered for the event. This conference is the second of three group-learning sessions conducted during our eight-month leadermentoring program. To kick off the conference, our client sponsor has arranged for one of its most respected VPs to attend and recount his personal path to becoming a leader. This VP (we’ll call him Dan) has come to the conference with no prior prompting or preparation. Our program is new to this organization, so there was no history or reputation for him to fall back on for a sense of what was about to happen; he was not briefed by me or anyone on what to say. The sponsor simply told this VP that we wanted to hear his story about how he became a leader (not a manager), and we wanted it to be spontaneous. So here is what Dan told the group: “Let me begin with a story from when I was a young manager, in a position junior to what you in this room now hold,” he began. “It starts with Larry, a VP whom some of you might remember. I met him only once, more than a decade ago. I was working on an important project, under the scrutinizing gaze of 15 16 Leader Mentoring the whole organization. We were all counting on the success of this project. But it failed. “A few days following this failure, my immediate boss, AJ, whom some of you may remember as being a tough guy to work for (and I worked for him for 15 years!) came by my office to inform me that we were both going to go see the VP—none other than Larry. Not good, I assumed. “AJ and I stepped into the VP’s office with all the trepidation one would expect after such a high-profile failure. ‘So what happened?’ the VP asked, after a few very brief preliminaries. “AJ and I looked at each other, trying to decide silently who would answer first. AJ took it on. He was forceful but not defensive about our preparation and about how we’d incorporated all that we knew and understood at the time. The technology of the project was daunting, and obviously not particularly interesting to Larry. I only added, ‘I don’t know if we’ll ever know what exactly when wrong.’ “‘Well, it was a difficult project, but we’re here to do difficult things. Get it right the next time,’ Larry barked, looking straight at me. “I left the office while AJ remained behind. As I left, I felt stunned and relieved, but amazed most of all. A next time? There would be a next time? I actually felt uplifted and buoyant as I made my way back to my team and relayed the exciting news. We were getting a second chance! “After a year’s worth of more dogged, hard, and often frustrating work, the project failed once again. Even more so than the previous time, I was devastated. I stood out on a balcony overlooking the site of the failed test and never felt more alone, feeling like the world caved in. After some time—I don’t know how long—AJ approached me from behind, put a hand on my shoulder and said, ‘I know how you feel, but pull yourself Leader Mentoring 17 together, Dan. The people on your team are inside and they need you. Go back in there. We’ll talk about all this in the morning.’ “That second failure happened 10 years ago. It’s ironic that I am here, in front of you, senior managers and directors, in a mentoring program, telling this story. After times like these— and there were more—did I ever imagine I would be a VP in this organization, filling Larry’s shoes? Did I ever imagine I’d be asked to speak to a group of our most distinguished managers and scientists about my experience as a leader? Certainly not!” At that point, Dan paused. He became pensive. As he took off his glasses and looked down at the table in front of him, he seemed to be recalling that moment standing alone out on the balcony. In a moment, he collected himself, looked up, and locked his attention back on the conference attendees. “Only a few months back, in an airport (where else?!), I met up with Larry, that VP who so long ago gave me that second chance,” Dan resumed. “Up until that moment in the airport, I hadn’t seen Larry again after our meeting in his office. He’s retired now, but, incredibly, he recognized me, seemed glad to see me, and so we started to talk. That’s when he surprised me a second time. I told him about my own promotion to the position he once held. ‘That’s great,’ Larry said, ‘a lot of people, for a long time, had been grooming you for that.’ In that instant, I suddenly realized, through all those failures (and successes too), through all the many times of testing me, and my anxiety about how something had turned out, through of all of that...I was being mentored the whole time! “I knew about some of the mentors I had throughout that time, like AJ, my boss out there on the balcony. I would have followed him into hell after that experience on the balcony with such much-appreciated support he was giving me at that trying moment. But I didn’t know about some of my other mentors, 18 Leader Mentoring such as Larry, for example. And maybe there were others too! So I am here today, in front of you and with you, here at a ‘mentoring conference’ to tell you all this: no mentors, no leaders!” Dan had been lucky. A decade ago he’d worked with people who had taken the concept and practice of “leader mentoring” very seriously. Today, due mainly to the pressures and demands of corporate/executive life, true mentoring is rarely done. And when it is done, in the context of in-house mentoring programs for instance, it is usually thought of as helping younger employees with career advancement and getting them connected with the right people, the ones they’ll “need to know” in order to get ahead. Dan’s organization was different. It still valued mentoring. Because it showed appreciation for how difficult it can be for managers to clear the time to really do leader mentoring, our sponsor had hired us to come in and help them do it right. Professional Leader Mentors? What is a “professional leader mentor”? What does one do? How do professional leader mentors contribute to an organization’s success? What value do they provide when compared with other professional advisory and consulting services? I view leader mentoring as an exceptional and most ancient relationship that has been offered through the eons, to people who step out of the norms of everyday life in order to offer the possibility of transforming new possibilities into the products, services, and institutions that mark our everyday life. Leader mentoring views leading as a creative enterprise, and as such views each leader as one whose talents and energies need to be channeled and shaped to the rigorous demands of leading. Mentoring Leader Mentoring 19 happens because someone has the aspiration to create followers in this great adventure, so that collaboration can improve lives. Mentoring is necessary because the pitfalls in leading are many, the rewards few, and the demands unending. The leader cares about the followers, and the mentor cares about the leader. In this great chain of care and attention, great things can happen. Mentoring differs from instruction, teaching, and coaching in that it emphasizes the qualities and values of life that are needed to sustain oneself in the creative endeavor, not the talents and skills used for the purpose of executing a project. Mentoring is a manner of both exemplifying a way of life and testing the initiate as he embarks upon this new way. As a result of the mentoring process, a “master” determines whether or not the initiate has a chance of succeeding in this life of leading. “Leader mentoring” focuses on the creative aspects of leading. We envision leading as being on a continuum of creative endeavors, rather than being a salient point of a managerial process. Leading often involves a lot of drudgery, and so we fully acknowledge how leading within a contemporary organizational setting is embedded (or fully submerged) within the culture of managerial expertise, and its exacting demands for productive excellence. But leading came before managing. Leading also came before art, and before words were ever spoken. Leading pulses in the heart and drives the rhythm of conscious, organized life (as observations of other mammalian species attest). In its human form, at its core, leading is a creative force. To the extent that humans are able to consolidate visions into realities, leaders make that possible. To the extent that humans bring into existence more expansive and encompassing, and more satisfying and sustaining, ways for people to engage with each other and their natural environments, leaders are doing their work. 20 Leader Mentoring Through the years it has been my observation that in our business and service organizations, in the crunch to meet demands for stockholder returns and compete internationally, with budgets cut and timeframes for production squeezed to the breaking point, mentoring has been all but discarded. This book asks you to consider this proposition: It’s high time for it to once again assume a special place in the way we find, inspire, and cultivate our prospective and aspiring leaders. We ask you to consider that leader mentoring needs to be regarded as a high-level advisory and transformational service to those we perceive will one day become our future leaders. It needs to be offered with care and selectivity by organizations that want to grow and change; and it needs to be “professionalized” as well, so that hiring organizations and selected participants in a mentoring process can anticipate what is being asked of them in the encounter. For creative figures such as artists, for instance, mentoring has always been considered a necessary component in their growth and maturation. We readily accept a sequence of events in the development of an artist once artistic talents are discovered by parents or teachers who see the budding artist’s talent and spark. Encouraging this prodigy to take up more serious studies is a given, for example. During this education the young artist will be encouraged to find and emulate a teacher and an exemplar. If the artist is lucky, someone who is already established in the field will take the young artist under a wing and usher the artist into a world where new works of art are appreciated, even funded and purchased. Support will be available (and likely constructively criticized). I view “leading” as being the most basic driver on the continuum of human creative processes. I place leading on a continuum of creative figures that includes artists and mystics and prophets. This is very different from viewing leading as a step in Leader Mentoring 21 a managerial ascent from worker to manager, to higher manager, to leader, atop a hierarchical pyramid. By placing leading on a creative continuum, rather than a managerial one, I suggest that leaders go through the same process of being discovered, being nurtured, and finding exemplars as artists do. And so leader mentoring is as necessary for them as for any creative person. I put leaders on this creative continuum particularly when they devote their lives to creating a community of followers who transform expansive and encompassing possibilities into the kinds of concrete products, services, institutions, and relationships that refresh and revitalize our humanity. Leaders, in fact, arise only when it is recognized that some aspect of our living needs a new kind of attention, a fresh approach and new vision, in order to help us feel alive and thriving in our daily lives. Leaders take action by creating organizations that bring these new possibilities to fruition and make them available to as many as possible. Leaders undertake three intertwining transformations in order to take on their creative roles: First they transform themselves, moving on from there to transform the situations around them so that new and more-encompassing possibilities can become realities. These transformations affect one another. As the effort grows, matures, and changes, the leader also must undertake a transformation once again to meet and absorb the changing situation. Finally, as the leader progresses in her life, her perspective of and commitment to her leading changes as the place that leading occupies in her life changes in such a way that careful and studied decision-making is required if she is to continue to make the right life choices. Mentors help leaders make their way through all those transformations. Mentors foster the transformations a leader must undertake in going from being an essentially private and quiet 22 Leader Mentoring person to a new way of living, in which others need the leader in order to collaborate in striving to achieve a large goal. The mentor helps the new leader fully accept, articulate, organize, and implement this new and large-scale vision. During the process of such change, a mentor will stay with the leader. Mentors acknowledge the sense leaders continually harbor, of frustration at the present state of things, of resistance to the opportunity that is so clearly apparent. Through conversation and attention, the leader mentor will help the leader mentee to crystallize that sense into a commitment, a vision, and a productive organization. Finally, the mentor will help the leader decide whether to allow this leading role to become fused with a larger part of the leader’s identity, to the point that the mentee decides that he in fact is a leader, that his life is about leading, and that wherever he goes, leading is what will be most at stake for him. To achieve this, what do mentors actually do? In general, mentors take such actions as the following: They observe that particular spark in a person’s eye when the challenge of creating a new capability in the world arises. Mentors see that this person doesn’t reduce what she sees to a function, a rule, or a habit, but instead determines what new situation or set of conditions can be an opening to a new and exciting development (or different reality), and something that can literally (as several of my own leader mentees have put it) “make a difference.” Mentors must see and feel in their protégés1 that pulse of excess energy, that exceptional will, that heady commitment to carry this notion forward, with others, in collaboration and with a sense of shared aspiration. Later in the leader’s life the mentor’s role is to catch the leader’s dream in mid-flight so that it can find its place in actual daily living. The mentor reflects to the leader Leader Mentoring 23 how he is the right (or wrong) person (organization) to realize the dream. Finally, mentors reflect who this leader will have to be and become, and what this organization will have to accomplish, if the dream is to be realized. The Current Leader-Development Scene How do we develop our leaders today? Typically, this happens in factory-like ways in order to drive machine-like, profitable production practices. We send our potential leaders to schools to learn the mechanics of accounting, motivating, and strategizing; we coach them to embody the principles that vindicate productive values and actions; we inure them to the benefits that accrue from taking on more authority in the productive enterprise. We then evaluate them on the basis of their productivity and output, their relative success in marshaling the resources of the people, machines, capital, and organization they are given. This is all to the good in one respect. Of course, we need people in these roles. Any leader will tell you that no organization can succeed without the efforts of effective managers. We need the schools, the coaches, and the evaluation systems that produce them. That said, a distinction must be made: Although these kinds of processes produce and support a supply of managers necessary for running and maintaining our commercial, political, and social institutions, true leading is not managing. Leading is a completely different activity that stands apart from managing. Managerial training and motivation techniques today have appropriated some of the ideas about leading (such as innovating, driving out of the box, and motivating with persuasion and passion rather than authoritarian coercion). But those things alone 24 Leader Mentoring do not transform managing into leading, no matter what the rhetoric in which it’s dressed. In my view, although leaders must be capable of carrying out all these managerial tasks and skills, they are the very ones who, since the beginnings of this distinctively human endeavor, instinctively set out to change managerial practices. Leaders were the first to break away from the habits of the first human habitat in order to mark out new territories and develop new means by which a new and varied human endeavor could take shape. Leaders create new industries that require managerial techniques to be modified. Google does not use the same managerial processes that Carnegie used to produce steel in his day. Leaders rethink their businesses’ relationships to everything. They are reorienting their relations to their stakeholders, to take account of the interlocking responsibilities all of them share in order to drive and develop thriving economies. They are reshaping our relationships to each other, to make them more informative, provocative, encompassing, and, at the fringes, creative. And they are reorienting our productive relations to the realities of sustaining a viable human habitat on Earth. For a potential leader to break molds in this way, something special must beat in that heart: an excess of energy, a high sensitivity to the situation’s inadequacy, a huge capacity to care for others and to want something different for everyone involved. But just as naturally, all that energy can dissipate into thin air. For that energy to gather, coalesce, and organize into a force for change, something else has to happen. The appearance of a mentor is just such an event. I can imagine how someone had to look into the eyes of this nascent leader, see something there of immense significance, and signal to this person, “Carry on. Marshal those energies of yours into a force that will act upon our needs, and benefit us all. Leader Mentoring 25 Accept the consequences of the experiments these actions will entail.” And in this gaze it was signaled that this erstwhile leader would not be alone, that others would follow. It is this dreamcatching gaze that the mentor offers. We can imagine that even for the very first leader in all of human history, someone had to recognize a spark and then help gather those initial moments of inspiration into a continuous stream of resolve. And so it was within the gaze of that first mentor that the once-unfocused energies and untethered yearnings of the aspirant were forged into the power of a leader. The one who offered that gaze, before there was language, and maybe the cause for language to be born, was the leader’s mentor. As mentioned earlier, now leaders are faced with a cafeteria menu of training and development regimens for their choosing. The numbers of books cranked out that promise success are legion. Leadership education is big business—this book included. Universities offer their imprimatur to the regimens of successful practices; training organizations and associations offer their perspectives from within their niche in organizational life; armies of executive coaches now put their attentions and expertise at the service of leaders’ success. Again, all to the good. No longer can it suffice to have one leader of our tribe or our city. We need leaders in every sphere of our lives, from the political and military to the industrial and community sectors, and service and family groups. Any and all resources that can be brought to bear for our leaders can benefit our communal and organized lives. Mentoring, in the meantime, remains apart, and out of the maelstrom of advisory professions. Mentoring is still at its best when carried out informally, offered by a trusted friend, and accepted in a spirit of uplifting commitment. Many leaders benefit from having had the experience. But now formal mentoring programs exist within larger organizations, such as the community-based leader mentoring 26 Leader Mentoring program for aspiring leaders created and sponsored by my own firm. So, like it or not, mentoring has begun taking its place in the mainstream of advice-giving services, a component of the coaching/training/development industry that’s here to stay. “Professional” Mentoring As a professional mentor and as a trainer of professional mentors, I view my own effort as one that injects mentoring singularly, firmly, and powerfully into a matrix of creative (as opposed to managerial and hierarchical) relations. Mentors supply the kinds of attention that leaders can draw upon to shore up their own strengths and move beyond their habituated notions of success, or through their failure-engendered fears. In this book, I plan to distinguish mentoring from all those other training and coaching offerings, and establish the proposition that mentoring has a special stature. And I also want to clarify what mentoring really is, in the contemporary setting, with its demands of value and impact, and as it is offered professionally and commercially— that is, as a service for a fee. Let’s also answer several questions that are asked whenever a new field is opened, or when, as in this case, a very old practice is being adapted to new circumstances and placed within a new model. These questions include: x What is mentoring, and what kinds of interactions does it comprise? x Why it is different from other kinds of one-on-one advice situations a leader can employ? x How does it fit with other forms of advising? x When is mentoring called for, as opposed to management consulting or executive coaching? Leader Mentoring 27 x Why is mentoring a service worthy of being paid for, and how does one judge its value (despite its place as the most natural and intimate of utterly priceless relations)? x Who mentors? And who, even among aspiring leaders, gets mentored? x How does an organization incorporate professional mentoring (or non-professional mentoring) into its development program? The mentoring process used by my Arch of Leadership mentoring program focuses on those qualities and values that specifically pertain to sustaining and thriving in a life of creative leading.2 We help young managers to recontextualize their successes and failures so as to see in these efforts how the pulse of leading beats for them. We work with them to grow beyond notions of being self-confident, so as to instead cultivate self-trust— the resolve to move ahead despite doubts, and from there to learn from the experience. We also help our mentees see themselves as others see them, and so to create their personal leader brand, by means of which followers can trust whom it is they have freely chosen to bring into their lives as a leader. Our leader-mentoring process, emphasizing the kind of life needed to sustain a creative leading process, thus drives an analytical wedge between leading and managing. It is a wedge in the mind, intended to magnify situations encountered in organizational life. With this dividing tool, our mentees are better able to discern when managing will suffice, and when nothing less than leading is called for. That distinction is blurred in everyday practice, and it needs to be sharpened if we are going to cultivate the number and quality of leaders we need in order to engage the great issues facing us 28 Leader Mentoring today. Managing well is essential to the ongoing viability of any organization. Specifically, no organized and collaborative effort succeeds without effective managerial attention to setting goals and deadlines. Measuring, disseminating information, and evaluating against benchmarks are all necessary organizational functions. But these are not the functions of leading. Due to the need for managers in businesses, managerial tasks have been inflated and misdirected into being thought of as the equivalent of the actions of leading. Though necessary and vital operational and communicative processes, they have been incorrectly labeled leading. Especially at high, executive levels, the managers given responsibility for marshaling and monitoring these tasks, while siloed into departmental fiefdoms, are implicitly and continually identified as leaders. Thus, highly placed executives often mistakenly envision themselves as being leaders simply because they have been given this title. Yet for the most part, this is not the case. Leading is a distinctive activity to the extent that it moves people to new horizons, to places (physical and psychological) where they have never been before. Leading means embodying a vision that is made irresistible even before it is accomplished. Leading requires and demands courage, when its goals, from day to day, might not be clear. Leading means taking responsibility for opening and expanding people’s lives—not just getting the job done at any and all cost (although that demand can sometimes be essential as well). The work of a good leader mentor enables prospective leaders to measure themselves against personal and inspirational imperatives, and not just against achievement, or against operational objectives and bottom-line results. Mind you, these latter are not neglected, but they do occur almost secondarily, falling out of what the leader encourages people to be passionate about. Leader Mentoring 29 “Great leading” means that people collaborate and share a determination to put a vision into the world that never existed before, for the benefit of more people, and to the end of enriching the lives of those whom the endeavor affects. The willingness to step into big challenges, even at the risk of failure, and to see them through to the point of knowing when to change oneself, is the great lesson of mentoring. And that is why mentoring is the bottom line, the sine qua non of accomplishing anything great in the context of a business, service, community, or informal organization. Leader mentoring orients a person’s attention to the endeavor’s creative force, and to the energies of all who are creatively engaged in the effort. Success is not the standard, it is the result that has to be realized, and, in many cases, accepted. Mentoring is the process of seeing the success in the heart of the disappointments and frustrations that besiege any creative endeavor, and that frustrate and undermine much of the measurable success and satisfaction that comes from the effort. And so, the impossible gets done. The New Field of Professional Leader Mentoring This book lays out the terrain of what we see as a new field, an actual new level of organizational advisory practice. It builds on, and takes flight from, the established profession of executive coaching. Here we will focus on mentoring itself, and we’ll take up the distinction between this field and coaching in later chapters. This new field of professional leader mentoring comprises professionals who look at leading as a creative endeavor, and who 30 Leader Mentoring offer a specific regimen of consultation designed to help the mentee see what a life of leading entails. The mentor then helps the mentee to see how to strengthen those aspects of her own life that will most support her in that role. As I have said, any person who envisions entering into a life of creative engagement will need a mentor (or many mentors). And I have emphasized that many people have been blessed by finding and being found by mentors in the course of their lives. So “professional leader mentoring” offers something akin to these “natural” relationships, as well as offering something that is truly different. Specifically, professional leader mentoring differs from the kinds of mentoring that occur in the flow of other aspects of life in these ways: x It concentrates on only those skills of character required by the creative life of leading. x It is available by choice, at any time a leader or a leader’s advisor decides it is necessary. x It is a relationship that is strictly and singly focused on mentoring about the life of leading. There are no other complicating factors in the relationship. x It has regularity, a curriculum, and a stated and anticipated process with definite parameters. x It is a process with a definite beginning, middle, and end (and definite cost). x It is a process that is both exclusively individualized, and one that is tailored for the level, experience, and prospects of leading of each mentee. x The professional leader mentor is looking for specific outcomes, pertaining only to that individual mentee. Leader Mentoring 31 x A leader mentor’s efforts will always produce results. It may be that the mentee decides not to enter into leading, or it may be that the mentee decides to lead under different circumstances. But there will always be some kind of change that takes place. A colleague once said to me, as I described this notion to him of a new field of “leader advising,” “This is so timely. Management consulting has failed, executive coaching has failed, and so now we have an answer, leader mentoring.” So we could look at the situation this way: Leader mentoring is the next new thing in the consulting world. We hope for something more, however. We hope to restore to the world of our businesses, bureaucracies, service organizations, community groups, and even families, a kind of conversation that we believe has been drowned out by the din of commercial and consumer life. That is the conversation of recognizing and caring for the potential for greatness we see in others. Professional leader mentoring would have accomplished its mission if it did truly pass out of existence. And that success would not be marked by the failure of the advising process, but by its having been so well-modeled and so well-disseminated that mentoring had once again become essential to our commitment to a greater human endeavor. 32 Leader Mentoring Choosing the Candidate 33 Chapter One Choosing the Candidate W hen 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. 33 34 Leader Mentoring “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 leadermentoring 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 Choosing the Candidate 35 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, 36 Leader Mentoring “Dave, great question. You know, I’ve been thinking about that....” “You planning to leave, Hal?” asks another member, halfjoking. 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 Choosing the Candidate 37 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 38 Leader Mentoring 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?” Choosing the Candidate 39 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 40 Leader Mentoring 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 upperechelon 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. sions to Leading Aversions to Leading When I first conceived of my Arch of Leadership mentoring program, I began with an assumption that “leading” was a Choosing the Candidate 41 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 such as these may 42 Leader Mentoring not be good candidates for mentoring, despite their managerial prowess: BUREAUCRACIES. Let’s be honest: Some executives do not want leaders, and do not want people to lead at all in their organizations. Executives in organizations that are bureaucratic in nature may need to think carefully about whether or not it’s worth their while to implement leader mentoring. Prospective leaders mostly leave these kinds of organizations, and when such people do stay, the tensions they experience from being continually frustrated can be crushing. People who stay in such organizations do so for a variety of reasons, including: the work is interesting; the job is secure and the benefits are good (they have families to raise, they reason); they have achieved a high position that would be hard to step into elsewhere; there is often no other place where this kind of work is done. These motivations drive people away from the risks that leading entails, and bureaucratic organizations generally thrive on these kinds of motivations that their most loyal employees have. Other types of organizations experience different aversions to leading. In one organization we were considering as a client for leader mentoring, we were told by a skeptical executive, “My board doesn’t ask about my leading; it asks about the numbers.” This was a sales-based organization. It exists to sell its services, which were then performed by various contractors. Its new HR person had thought that mentoring key executives would help the company to be less internally competitive and less focused purely on money. In this way, we could help instill some kind of purpose by going through a leader-development process. Good idea, right sentiment...wrong environment. Most sales-oriented organizations have little or no need for leader mentoring. The respective motivations for sales and for leading never cross. Sales motivations are highly individualistic, and Choosing the Candidate 43 oriented to and measured within an extremely short time frame. Results are concrete and comparable, thus lending themselves to game-based competition. Leader motivations, instead, are strictly collaborative. A leader immediately thinks in terms of establishing an organization in order to accomplish something. Though the time span can be short, most likely it is actually quite long (and, in fact, frequently longer than the leader initially envisioned). And usually these organizations’ accomplishments cannot be measured by any generalized, comparative rubric. The leader and followers have to determine these metrics among themselves. And competition is highly modulated by collaborativ