There were few at PWE who did not know Elroy, and fewer still who can say “no” to him. He looks like a grizzly bear and sounds like a lion. His roaring voice and hearty laugh echo up and down the eleventh floor where PWE management resides. He is cheerleader, devil’s advocate, mentor, and hard-liner, all at once. If you want to see him, you have to be fast on your feet because he might be roaming the halls on any floor, walking into offices, engaging people in conversation, and finding out what is on their minds.
You can get into interesting debates with Elroy. They are hard to win not only because of his position, although that helps, but also because he has a very keen mind. I had learned that the best way to get along with him is to challenge his thinking, but you’d better be right or at least very convincing. You either love him or hate him. I belong in the former group, having worked for him six years before and with him a number of times since as an internal consultant.
Sitting across from his huge desk and leather chair, I felt dwarfed by him. I’m 5′4″, so I looked up to him in more ways than one. “I need you at TYH,” he told me, “but it’s going to be a challenge, Rachel.” He held up three fingers of his left hand. “In the first place,” he said, using his right index finger to bend the left one back, “don’t be surprised if the TYHers aren’t thrilled with another boss from PWE. In the second place,” he said bending back the next finger, “the fact that you’re temporary, and they know it, means they’ll see you as a surrogate. That’s something like a substitute teacher, without the respect. Finally, you’re going to know something they don’t know,” he said, tapping on the third finger, “and that’ll have an impact on you. You see, part of your job will be to assess the sales staff and recommend who should stay and who should be reassigned or terminated. I don’t need to tell you, your recommendation will carry a lot of weight with me.”
“Why pick me for this?” I asked. “I’m not in management. I don’t see myself as The Terminator, and besides my work is to help organizations be more effective.”
“Because I know how good you are at assessing situations. Besides that, I’ve seen you work with people, and I trust you. It’s a bit of a test, Rachel. As a contributor, you shine. As a coach, you’re top-notch. I’m wondering if you can make the tough calls.”
“Just a minute, Elroy,” I said, “suppose no one should be fired? What if the problems are with the processes and not the people? I don’t want to go to TYH as a PWE hatchet man (or woman).” I knew Elroy long enough and well enough to challenge him—especially when it involved a matter of principle.
“Fair enough,” he grinned. When he smiles like that, he looks like James Earl Jones, a black actor I admire greatly. “If anyone can pull this off, you can. At the very least, you’ll get material for the mentoring course you’ve been wanting to put on. Just don’t forget, Rachel, things have to change. If there’s someone there who doesn’t get the message, if they don’t reverse the downward trend, then....” He drew his index finger across his neck. I got the message. So, it was agreed. I would move to Houston temporarily, but the assignment probably wouldn’t last more than two to three months. I promised to stay in touch with Elroy by e-mail as well as to talk to him regularly about our progress.
That was the beginning of my adventure.
CHAPTER 1
Mentors and
Mentoring
By themselves, character and integrity do not accomplish anything. But their absence faults everything else.
— Peter Drucker
Looking back, I am no longer puzzled by Elroy’s choice. He knew full well I could not supervise the marketers. I knew too little about their business to help them sell more products. I had spent much of my career learning about what makes people successful. In this, I had been teacher, adviser and supporter to many at PWE. Those were the roles I played best, and Elroy knew it. He remembered what I had said to him about the mentoring course. Maybe that was why he chose me. To Your Health presented a challenge for me, and it was the learning opportunity that drew me there.
When I think about being a mentor, I recall the story of the starfish. A beachcomber is walking along the beach one morning when he sees a young man running up and down by the water’s edge throwing something in the water. Curious, he walks toward the runner and watches him picking up starfish stranded by the tide and tossing them back into the ocean. “Young man,” he says, “there are so many starfish on the beach. What difference does it make to save a few?”
Without pausing, the young man picks up another starfish, and flinging it into the sea, replies, “It made a difference for this one.” That’s what mentors do. They make a difference for one person at a time. That is why I am telling you my story. I want to make a difference for you, and I’m hoping you in turn will decide to do the same for someone else.
What Is a Mentor?
The word originated from Greek mythology. Mentor was the name of a wise and faithful advisor to Odysseus. When Odysseus (or Ulysses as the Romans called him) left for his long voyage, he entrusted the direction and teaching of his son Telemachus to Mentor. According to mythology, through Mentor’s guidance Telemachus became an effective and loved ruler. Today, the word is most often used to mean a friend and role model, an able advisor, a person who lends support in many different ways to one pursuing specific goals.
What Is the Purpose of Mentoring?
Contrary to popular myth, no mentor can ensure the success of another person, nor would that be desirable. One’s greatest satisfaction comes from personal achievement. A mentor’s principal purpose is to help another develop the qualities he needs to attain his goals—without a mentor. These qualities are wisdom, judgment, resilience, and independence.
Developing wisdom means learning how the “system” works. It doesn’t matter if you are in a university, a volunteer organization, a professional group, or a corporation. Every organization has rules—spoken and unspoken—that insiders know. By sharing these rules, a mentor helps her protégé become accepted as an integral part of the organization.
Judgment means understanding the consequences of decisions and actions. Many times people make decisions based on how they feel at the moment. A mentor, with objectivity and perspective, can help a mentee understand the long-term impact of his choices.
Resilience is learning from mistakes and coming back with renewed confidence, strength, and determination. Over time, everyone hits a brick wall, that obstacle that causes things to unravel. A mentor, by sharing stories of her own mistakes, helps the mentee recognize that the road to achievement rarely comes without challenges and even failures.
Independence occurs when one is ready to accept increasing challenges and reasonable risks. By pointing out the mentee’s achievements, a mentor supports her efforts to become self-reliant.
Why Mentoring Is an Art
Mentoring is not a science. People have different goals and come from different life experiences. One who would mentor must be able to determine the best help to offer. Some who seek advice have no idea what the right questions are; others, mistakenly or correctly, believe they know the answers and are merely seeking confirmation. Both represent a challenge. Sometimes the mentor must be a story teller; at other times, an empathetic listener. Occasionally, it’s a coach’s pep talk that is needed. The art is not merely knowing what to say but how to say it and when.
Some information one would share with others is delicate. I know a manager who helped a woman succeed by recommending an image makeover. He recognized her ability to move ahead, but he knew she didn’t look like a manager. Should that matter? Probably not, but it does. So he took a risk, and with the mentor’s art, he was able to frame his suggestion in such a way that she understood the good intentions behind it. There’s no cookbook for mentoring, but there is a process that works.
How Mentors Do It
The process of mentoring can best be described in eight words: lead, follow and get out of the way! I learned that from a very wise man,
but I’ll tell you more about that later. For now, the important thing is to understand the mentoring process. I think of leading as showing the way by role modeling, experience, or example; following, as advising and counseling (when asked) and getting out of the way as the art of withdrawing from a supportive relationship, while leaving the door open for a more collegial one.
In leading, mentors focus on the qualities of wisdom and judgment. By sharing what they have learned from experience, they provide perspective. They tell us the unspoken rules and point out the imaginary lines one should not cross. They help us explore the consequences of our decisions.
Over time, the mentoring relationship gradually transitions to the following phase in a change so subtle that neither party recognizes the exact moment it occurs. Leadership moves to the learner. The mentor becomes a sounding board, a support system, giving advice when asked. The focus is on helping the learner build resilience. In this phase it is important for mentors to share their own learning experiences and be willing to reveal themselves as vulnerable through stories of their personal challenges and even failures.
Getting out of the way involves granting another the right not to take advice, not to do it our way. It is also about understanding that all mentoring relationships end at some point. When that moment comes, it is important for the mentor to acknowledge it—to celebrate it and if need be to suggest other people who can offer future help and support.
Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yet, there are some complex points we need to consider. First of all, the process works differently when the person you want to mentor is a young adult, an ambitious new hire, a thirty-something workaholic, a cynical baby boomer or a fifty-year-old coasting toward the final five. I am going to share what I learned about these differences.
Second, the process is not necessarily linear. Sometimes mentors move back and forth between leading and following. People need space to experiment and even to make mistakes. Sometimes “getting out of the way” isn’t all that easy, or it may be desirable for one party but not the other. Most people don’t want to hear your problems, but almost everyone loves to give advice. One of the pitfalls of helping another is becoming overinvested in that advice or wanting to be in control. In spite of all this, I’ve always found mentoring very rewarding.
But let me get back to my story. It was 1996, and I was getting ready for my two to three months in Houston.
Can You Mentor Your Own Children?
I remember the mixed feelings I had about moving to Houston. On one hand, it seemed like a fascinating challenge. On the other, it meant leaving my husband Paul to “bach” it. We live in the quiet village of Oakville, Georgia, home of PWE’s Pharmaceutical Division. That’s a long way from the bustling city of Houston, culturally and emotionally.
Paul would have an extra challenge. Along with his home building business, he would be entrusted with the “care and feeding” of our nineteen-year-old son Brad, who had just dropped out after one mediocre year of college. He had been spending the last two months at home “rethinking” his life, and I got the impression Paul wanted him to accelerate that process, meaning get a job or go back to school, which increased my concern about leaving. Paul had assured me everything would work out. I believed Brad needed someone to talk to who could point him in the right direction, and based on the results we had already experienced, that person wasn’t Paul or me. For this reason, I don’t recommend mentoring your own children. When they are in your care, when you are responsible for their well being and deeply involved in their decisions, then what you do is called parenting. Your advice always has an emotional twist to it. There’s an innate desire on their part to please or, in Brad’s case, to rebel.
The mentoring relationship may have some of these components, but it doesn’t have the intense “push and pull” quality of a parent-child relationship. Does that still hold when children get older? I think it does. In the interaction between parent and adult children, there may be “mentoring moments,” those unique occasions when simple, objective truths go beyond the emotional bond. Still, a true mentoring relationship has no psychological or organizational strings.
There is this similarity between parenting and mentoring. The parent, like the mentor is a role model. The results of this aspect of parenting show up in the choices young adults make and how they treat others. Are their relationships compassionate and caring or needy and controlling? Are they willing to accept the consequences of their decisions, or do they prefer to stay at home and hold on to their childhood? In Brad’s case, the jury was still out.
Mentoring Requires Objectivity and Distance
Let me give you an example. A young man I knew was having some difficulties at work. Dave transferred into a different job, and his new supervisor made premature judgments about him based on one or two missed deadlines. There were reasons Dave had missed them, for his supervisor had delegated Dave’s training to a co-worker, who was buried under his own work and not the least bit interested in training someone he regarded as competition for top ranking.
Dave’s performance was suffering. Repeated attempts to discuss this situation with his supervisor led to little more than frustration. Now, Dave was single and an only child with understandably concerned parents. His father rushed to his rescue. He was totally on Dave’s side, characterizing the supervisor as a bully and pushing Dave to report him to the manager. Phil had the best intentions but no experience with corporate culture since he owned a small coin shop, which he had inherited from his father. As an advocate for his son, his approach to Dave’s problem, while well-intentioned, was far too parochial.
Fortunately, Dave had a former supervisor who understood how things work within the company. Dave trusted Gene because he had always been straight with him. Dave had sought his opinion before, and he had always considered Dave’s best interests. What’s more, Gene had never violated his confidence. Gene’s advice to Dave was to focus his energy on improving his performance, not on impressing his supervisor. Gene knew Dave’s supervisor to be somewhat unapproachable. He also knew that by working more diligently to satisfy customers, Dave would have the best opportunity to influence his supervisor’s perception. Nothing, Gene assured Dave, would give him more credit than good reports from others.
Gene’s insight and perspective were what Dave needed to solve his problem. He took the advice and, in time, just as Gene predicted, word of his efforts and the results filtered back to his supervisor with a positive effect. That brings me to the next question.
Should Supervisors Mentor Subordinates?
I’ve asked a number of people this question. Their responses are mixed. Some were mentored by supervisors or managers but only after they left the groups they were in. Some have never had a mentor. Only one was mentored by his supervisor, but they had a special bond from the beginning based on a common hobby.
The real issue is the same as with parenting. Parents have a responsibility for their children. Supervisors are primarily responsible for the group’s performance. That means the welfare of the whole is above the immediate needs of the individual. If a supervisor chooses to mentor an individual, that could create a conflict of interests, first by her preferring one employee over another and second, by her subordinating the team’s needs to that of the individual. Good supervisors don’t do either. There is a certain amount of distance from the every day “battlefield” required in a mentoring situation, and supervisors, by definition, are in the midst of the action. Occasionally, just as there are “mentoring moments” between parents and adult children, there may be a few mentoring moments between supervisor and subordinate. Those moments can be powerful if they are not work-related. Beyond that, my recommendation to supervisors is be a coach, be a supporter, and give performance advice to the people who report to you. Those are all part of the supervisory relationship, or should be, but leave mentoring to someone else. My advice to people looking for mentors is pick someone away from the field of battle.
Wha
t Do Mentors Do?
A mentor is teacher, coach, sponsor, counselor, advisor—to a group of one. Her interest is in you as an individual. Mentors teach you the unspoken rules of an organization: how to dress, what to say, how to get projects approved, insider information that can make or break a career. Sometimes they pass on information not generally known or warn you about particular pitfalls. They keep you from wearing a brown suit when a blue or gray one is required or responding to the wrong question in a meeting. They make introductory phone calls and lend you support in countless other ways. They share their experiences with you, the ones they won’t tell anyone else, and they expect something back for that: loyalty, confidentiality, attention, appreciation and commitment to a common goal. Some mentors do all of these things; some, just one or two. Sometimes one happens to find a mentor in a former supervisor or manager. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, a mentor finds you.
Organizations know their value. That’s why they establish mentoring programs to “jump start” new employees or help longer-service ones overcome obstacles. These are worthwhile efforts; however, their success varies because it is based on the dedication of those who participate. Assigned mentors are like arranged marriages; some take, some don’t. It all depends on commitment and chemistry. The ideal situation is when two individuals form a common bond. Then, stand back and watch what happens!
I’ve been fortunate to form those bonds with several people. That’s why, in spite of my marching orders from Elroy, I decided to focus not on the group, not on their performance, but on each of the marketers as individuals. I had been assured a supervisor would soon be along. In the meantime, my intention was to be a mentor to each of them.
The Art of Mentoring Page 2
