I dont need a Mentor

 

I don't Need a Mentor!

(a person focus)

 

 

I am 32 years old and have an MBA. I have spent five successful years with one of the top five FMCG companies in the country and almost a decade of experience in the industry. I am rapidly scaling the heights of management and will soon be appointed sales manager. Why should I be mentored? I need to mentor someone to be like me!

 

I get this response from employees who see no need for mentoring. I thought so too. Indeed mentoring was a dirty word. In a world where everyone likes to feel, "I did it my way" and I did not need anybody to show me how to succeed in a career. I thought of mentorship as a carryover from the old school. In one sense, it is true. I thought of mentoring like tuition. In the old days, only the weak students went for remedial classes. Why should anyone who is doing well be mentored. After all, they are doing what they are expected to do.

 

Few people make mentoring a priority. There is therefore little chance for it to influence business success. It is dying from disuse and abuse. This powerful leadership growth tool needs to be reintroduced to business. Something has to be done to rescue thousands of careers that could have had happier beginnings and better endings. Mentoring I have found gives a value additional drive to a career. Like a turbo charged engine which receives extra power from an additional fuel injector. Mentoring helps you benefit from two careers not just one. You benefit from your mentors experience and learn from your own mistakes.

 

To convince our future sales manager that mentoring will add value to his career, we will have to use guerrilla tactics. That means we give him three isolated examples where it has worked. Then we must let him decide if he wants to be mentored or not.

 

CASE ONE

I had been a teacher for more than five years before I applied for a job as a management consultant. My boss looked me over and for a moment must have wondered what to do with me. I had the ambition, but lacked the certificates and the skill to do the job well. I think he liked me, but knew I would not make it unless I was quickly injected with new competencies and he was not going to be around to help me grow. He reached across his desk, pulled out a shabby file from the shelf, and thrust it in my hand. The file was labeled "How To". With a firm handshake and a wish for good luck, he set off on safari for several months. That file was the most precious career gift he could have given me. I can safely say that my transition from teaching to consulting was successful due to the contents of that file.

 

At the time I was given the file, I really did not know what to think. Here I was beginning a new phase of life and all I had to help me was an old file. The file did not contain any dramatic information. All it contained was lists of how to carry out tasks; how to file documents, how to telemarket, how to write a letter etc. All the things I would have had to ask a mentor to explain. The MD knew the troubles I would face in his absence and used the file to mentor me. I must have done well because in a couple of years he made me the manager.

 

CASE TWO

In the workplace, older staff guide new joiners, not because they are old, but because they are more knowledgeable in the ways of the company. They are thus able to lead and brief the new comers on how things are done. This is a perfect setting for mentorship. Organization culture turns sour when this phase of mentorship is ignored, assumed or downplayed. The onus of course is on the older staff to mentor new staff. Staff have the power to make or break a business. A business can easily fail if an outgoing set of managers do not pass on the value of success to an incoming team. Manager mentoring needs to be done with care and foresight. Though the sales manager does not need mentoring for his own sake, he needs it for the organizations sake. It needs to guarantee its continuity by mentoring incoming staff.

 

CASE THREE

Employers go to great lengths to hire highly qualified staff. They hope that these staff will deliver desired results. This does not turn out to be the case often enough. Despite high qualification, many of recruits turn out to be unskilled and perform below expectations. Recruitment agencies make a lot of money from employers searching for competent candidates. Employers, such as top-notch FMCG companies, can use mentoring to get round this huge cost of recruiting high fliers.

 

Instead of recruiting new staff, the question employers should be asking is how to bridge the gap between certificates and performance within the business? Why so do many know-what to do and yet so few know-how to get the job done. The key to bridging the gap if finding those who know-how and getting them to mentor those who know-what. If anything, the process of mentorship is less costly than recruitment. Know-what is about education, while know-how is the skill that gets the work done.

 

If you are not mentored, you are bound to repeat the mistakes of your predecessors and continue the cycle of incompetence one more time. Whenever you start something new, you need a mentor. Mentoring has three critical elements the person, the patron and the process. As we can see from these examples, the person is critical. With an attitude like that of our future sales manager, mentoring is unlikely to be helpful. Unfortunately, he will be all the poorer for it. A person's attitude is more important than the process. The processes used are often far from perfect. Without a positive attitude, the process will not be useful.

 

Mentoring is required in induction, apprenticeship and internship. It requires contact hours between a mentor and mentee. Mentoring is both a personal and technical. It has soft and hard elements. The soft elements include counseling, attitude and patience. The hardware can be explained as the "How To" file or process steps and work methods the mentor will pass on to new and growing staff.

 

The patron or the mentor also needs to be interested in his job. Many times mentoring fails because mentors are unlikeable characters. They are hard to get along with and so give the whole process a bad name. They are so impatient they would rather do it themselves than agonize over showing someone else how to the job. A common mistake mentors make is to make the person "be like me". This is far from the best value a mentor can provide. Mentors need to walk the person through three phases.

 

1) Help the person master technical routines

2) Teach them tips on how to do the job better, and

3) Help the person develop his or her own style

4) Help the persons realize their full potential

 

Careers, culture and business continuity depend on the work of mentors. All staff need mentoring if only to maintain the status quo. Fresh graduates need mentoring. However, even our future sales manager will benefit from the success and mistakes made by those who were in office before him.

 

Allan Bukusi

2009