Thursday 2 April 2015

Tough Love, Freely Given - A Mentoring Manifesto


As the actor Kevin Spacey is oft quoted in a LinkedIn meme, `If you are lucky enough to do well, it’s your responsibility to send the elevator back down. `
I like to think I keep pressing the button. I like mentoring people.  I make no bones about it.  I get a kick out of helping raw talent quickly ascend to the highest positions. It’s become part of my DNA.
But, I’ve learned recently that there are diverging views on what constitutes mentoring and what is good practice.  Let me be clear. I consider mentoring is about one thing and one thing only - helping individuals achieve their true potential.
It’s about the mentoree, not the mentor.  It’s about them constantly improving.  It’s about them fulfilling their ambition. It’s not about theory; it’s about practice.
And for the mentor it’s about caring, but not about being compromised in that care.  It’s not about there, there; it’s about here and now and the realisation that the mentor is only as good as the mentoree’s success.
It’s about being constantly on call to help guide mentorees through decisions, providing perspective.  It's about distilling experience, letting people explain, reflect and safely experiment to build up their confidence.  
It’s absolutely not about allowing mentorees to sit forever in their comfort zones, obfuscating or making excuses for inaction. Neither is it about patronising, delivering mealy mouthed platitudes or creating warm fuzzy feelings.
It’s about fearless engagement with reality; about clear development goals and SMART objectives. It’s about holding people to account.

It is about exposing individual and cultural attitudes and their appropriateness to achieving goals. It’s about telling people what they might not want to hear.

It might be about empathy, but rarely about sympathy and it's definitely about emotional intelligence and understanding the whole person.

It’s about considering all the internal and external factors that might be compromising progress. It’s about working out and agreeing with the mentoree how to confront them, deal with them or bypass them. But it’s always about moving forward their personal development.

And it’s always about truth, clarity and mutual responsibility.
To paraphrase the slogan of one of my favourite causes, Big Issue Foundation, `it’s about a hand up, not a hand out`.
Most of all, though, it’s about tough love, freely given.
  








 

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