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Organizational Development &Mentorship: A More Productive Alternative to Hierarchical Management
~ An Adjunct to Teams ~
Part I: What is Mentorship?A Mentor is, using the simplest definition, a teacher. Some teachers are mentors. Others are not. But all mentors have gone beyond simply teaching. Most of us have experienced being taught by teachers who had a good grasp of the material being taught. The same teacher might have taught the subject well, in a style easily accessible to us. Perhaps that teacher even inspired us in some way. There are a few key ideas that set mentoring apart from teaching. A teacher who knows the subject thoroughly, inspires us by talk and example, who encourages our making of creative mistakes, who truly wants us to succeed and does not feel threatened by our skills, ability and success, that teacher is a mentor. A mentor is also a leader. A mentor is a leader who nurtures our learning experience, respects our humanness and adulthood, and fiercely guards the process of the teaching/learning experience. A mentor is a leader who is conscious of the duality of the mentor/mentoree relationship and the direct payback s/he receives. As the mentor is learning also, the mentor becomes conscious of being only a point in the process. The mentor is learning how to inspire, teach, and be receptive to the mentoree’s experience. There is an equality that is present in mentoring that is not always present in the teaching/learning experience. This equality is born of respect, effort, integrity, ability, and mature cooperation.
Mentorship is a process of appropriate sensitization/desensitization in combination with teaching/learning. It is based on the concept of accepting the human being into the workplace as an asset because of their humanness. Because mentorship provides the tools necessary for welcoming the human into the workplace, and the skills to harness that humanity, that humanness will assist in the running of the company, as well as in teaching/learning process. The extra step of accepting responsibility for another’s job experience, and another’s learning/teaching process, engages employees with the company, co-workers, and the specific job in a way that does not come about in teamwork alone. Mentorship is a leadership skill. This leadership skill is accessible to all employees, working best when implemented across job delineation at the company wide level. Because this is leadership that both demands and invites maturity and skill, it can only broaden the corporate vision.
Mentoring has requirements:
In it’s most basic form, mentoring requires, of the mentor, taking responsibility for another’s education and welfare in the workplace, the fearlessness to share what you know, and the willingness to be educated in return. Of the mentoree, mentor management requires a willingness to not fake the answers, to learn, and be willing to teach the mentor how to help you learn.
The other requirement is recognizing you will be both mentor and mentoree at all times.
Part II: What’s the benefit?/Why does this work?
It may be helpful to look at “mentorship management” in terms of the more common “teamwork management” system currently in use, which in itself was an upgrade of the rigidly hierarchical management systems of the top-heavy companies of the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s. Mentorship management encompasses the basic principles of teamwork management and takes them one step further, creating a more flexible team with a higher level of commitment and skill.
If properly implemented, destructive time-wasting competitiveness and “hoarding” of job assignments or skills are eliminated. Subtle bullying is eliminated. (Teamwork should have eradicated the expensive obvious bully when it was implemented) A certain equality becomes present within the team, regardless of external hierarchy. The equality creates a more generous flow of information, skill, and assignment sharing. The team itself becomes more fluid, owing to its higher levels of cooperation.
The Cooping of information, skills and assignments means a higher creative level, more output, and a generally greater speed. This enables the entire company to engage more competitively in the marketplace. The higher level of commitment employees have to their teams directly translates to a higher corporate commitment, and has the added advantage of quickly pointing out any employee not able to engage in the manner required for team excellence.
Employees who are liabilities are quickly spotted by other team members, and the necessary intervention, whether education or termination, is handled early on, preventing loss of time and money to the corporation with minimal disruption to the team and work in progress.
Mentorship management honors the person as worker, encourages creative job engagement, enhances commitment to the job, company and coworkers, and saves time, money, and energy.
Part III: How does mentorship benefit management?
1) Sounder knowledge of already known information/honing of skills.
We’ve all heard the phrase, “We teach what we need to learn”. The benefit to managers who mentor is a sounder knowledge of what they already know. In teaching a subject to someone else, any gaps become apparent to the teacher, therefore, the knowledge base of managers can only broaden by teaching. Communication and teaching skills are honed when information is passed with the requirement of considering the individual; managers develop a diversity not previously asked of them. This is good for the company: a manager who can tailor their managing to an employee or team brings out the best they have to offer. This is good for the individual manager as this diversity is highly valued as a corporate commodity, standing them in good stead should their job change.
2) Better knowledge of employees:
Because mentorship requires a more open direct working relationship and a higher level of trust between parties, it is likely managers will develop a deeper knowledge of each employee. Mentorship creates a setting for a deeper intimacy of who each person is at work, what their strengths and weaknesses are, where their skills need to be offered to others or refined.
3) Fine-tuned communication:
Because mentorship requires the advancing of speaking, listening, and “acting on” skills to a finer degree than teamwork alone, overall communication levels rise. This has a number of benefits: managers spend less time untangling botched or missed information. Managers are free to attend to main projects. There is a smoother flow to the work. The opportunity for faster completion arises. Because workers are encouraged to admit they didn’t understand (without fear of reprisal) and not to fake understanding, they may feel more confident to question instructions, thus increasing the likelihood of an efficient & correct outcome. While at times it may seem that all this communicating may slow things down, in the long run, it averts those project black-holes where it seems like everyone on the team has been playing “Operator” and has veered off track.
Part IV: How does Mentoring Benefit the Company?
1. Improved skill levels/broader knowledge base serves to make the company more resourceful in a changing market, and more efficient in a stable one.
2. Higher communication levels increase efficiency, problem solving and strategic planning.
3. Concern for other’s job welfare and success breeds loyalty to each other and directly translates into concern for company welfare and success. People who care do a better job. Since mentoring encourages the “human” in the workplace, and encourages the development of integrity and maturity, people feel respected and valued. People who are cared for (respected) do a better job. People who are recognized as having something valuable to offer want to come to work. Mentoring recognizes the value of all involved in the process. Teams that care about each other, the company, and the work they do produce outstanding results. Mentoring also recognizes we may not all like each other, and offers us a way of working together with respect and integrity, regardless of personal feeling. This is a tremendous asset to cleaning up the pettiness that adds up into wasted time, effort, and finally, money. Because mentorship management respects adults as workers and doesn’t try to make everyone a happy company family, the cynicism that bogs down performance levels is faced down with a directive: we won’t try to fool you, and we expect maturity and integrity in return. The new contract is: We offer you adult integrity and respect in the work place. We expect adult integrity and respect in return.
4. Mentoring requires a certain level of work intimacy. It will be far more difficult to hide a misunderstanding, a bad attitude, and a bad job. As was stated earlier: employees who are liabilities are quickly spotted by other team members, and the necessary intervention, whether education or termination, is handled early on, preventing loss of time and money to the corporation with minimal disruption to the team and work in progress.
Part V: How does Mentorship benefit the employees?
1) When employees mentor, they learn how to teach, how to communicate, how to shepherd each other, the management and the company in the learning process.
Employees mentor by teaching management and coworkers how to communicate with them, and being willing to set an example of risk taking by engaging in direct communication under difficult circumstances. The direct benefit of this is respect. Employees earn the respect of the management and coworkers. They earn their own respect. Good direct communication skills are a highly valued commodity at any job, as is self-respect and respect for others. (See benefit to managers above)
Employees mentor, like management mentors, by teaching, sharing, and modeling. This encourages a higher level of communication, a higher level of commitment, and tolerance, because mentoring asks you to have the maturity to set aside personalities and care anyway for that person’s job experience and encourage a successful outcome. These are job/life skills that transcend the current workplace and add to one’s overall desirability as an employee. Mentoring teaches a combination of teaching, leadership and life skills that can be taken anywhere.
2) Mentoring encourages free exchange of work knowledge
Mentoring frees all parties from the perils of “faking it”, allowing anyone to request a more detailed explanation. There is less danger of missing information that may affect job performance. Everyone involved has a stake in thoroughly understanding exactly what’s needed, and a stake in each other’s overall success. You have people on your side that may know more than you and are committed to helping you learn it well. This atmosphere opens the door for employees to learn thoroughly skills or knowledge they might not have been able to otherwise obtain.
Part VI: What's required to Implement Mentorship?Ideally, people’s jobs in teams will transition from the current working together to actually being responsible for each other's education and job welfare. The critical axis that this process of raising the skill level depends on the following:
1. There must be no fear of reprisal to the statement, “I don’t know.” as made by either the manager or employee. {No fear of not knowing enough}
2. There must be no fear of reprisal for sharing what you do know. {No fear of being upstaged, or usurped}
3. There must be no limit to what you are willing to teach.
4. There must be no limit on what you are willing to learn.
Obviously these principles are part of the training process itself, but these issues must be forthrightly addressed both before and during the implementation process. This brings us to the first key idea in Mentoring.
Attitude
1) Suspension of cynicism. Not every company is “Dilbert’s” company. Corporations can change. Avoiding responsibility is not inevitable. Red tape, baffling policy, resistance to positive growth are not givens in the work environment. Cynicism is an out growth of suspicion and skepticism. Suspicion and skepticism are appropriate and useful tools in discerning the credibility of a system, and should not be suspended. Cynicism however, is based on the assumption that probably nothing will work, or change, or be possible. This attitude will block implementation of any new system.
2) Commitment. The company must commit, and the individuals that make up the company must commit to the change of status quo.
TeamworkTeamwork is comprised of: being willing to work together, sharing responsibility, ideas, failure and successes. Mentorship takes these qualities and adds new ones:
1) Accepting responsibility for the teaching/ learning experience and the tone of the environment.
“I’ve come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It’s my personal approach that creates the climate. It’s my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a persons life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is MY response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a person humanized or dehumanized.”*
*(The word “child” has been replaced with the word “person” throughout the quote above.)
In the mentoring experience, ALL parties are responsible for the climate. This is a significant point. To hold all/both parties responsible for the climate of the experience and it’s success respects that this is an adult/adult contract, pointedly different from teaching children. Since many of us will have had the majority of our teaching experience modeled when we actually were children, it is important to note this would be a different experience. The power to wreck havoc is equal, as is the power to create a successful outcome. This is a shared experience. It is created jointly.
2) Acknowledging differences between teamwork & mentor management.
Because of the increased power and influence each person has when engaged in the process of mentoring, it is important to see where the differences lie and accept the inherent burden of responsibility. While many of these concepts are already familiar to those engaged in teamwork, they become doubly important when asking those in teams to become even more responsible.
Communicationa) Direct communication only (No gossip)
The most bungled direct communication is still better than any form of indirect communication, whether it be gossip or communication deliberately directed through a second party. The trust needed to put you in either the teaching or learning situation requires direct dealing on all levels.
b) Honesty.
It is not easy to be honest and direct in difficult or potentially threatening situations. It is much easier to gossip, or if you are able to avoid gossip, to let things slide or ferment. Honesty requires you to speak directly to someone you might not like at this moment, or whom you fear may jeopardize your job if you express frustration or lack of understanding.
c) Integrity.
You do it anyway. Direct dealing raises everyone’s self-esteem and level of trust. Maybe it won’t in the moment, but it will over the long haul. Haven’t we all been around people who weren’t too tactful, but at least we knew they were honest and always told us the issues in a timely and direct manner? Integrity breeds respect. You may still end up not liking the other person you may be working with, but you will respect them, and they you, if...
Integrity breeds respect, if you both:
1) Deal with each other in a timely, direct manner.
2) Be honest
3) Say the hard stuff anyway
4) Cut each other some slack for doing it the best you can
(even if you don’t like the other’s style).
d) Slack.Moving to this level demands commitment, courage and persistence. It also requires we cut each other some slack. So your co-worker, employee, or boss didn’t say something as perfectly as you wanted, or as quickly. They said it to you directly. Because the issue was directly said, there is little likelihood of its being on it’s way through the office grapevine. You now know you can trust this person to talk to you.
Knowing these things are far more important than whether or not the issue was broached well, or said it in the most tactful way. So your team member got just a mite defensive when you asked how the report was coming, they continued to work with you in good faith, and you can see they were trying to put the defensiveness aside.
You must be willing to put the focus on the issues, the process, and at the same time become sensitive to someone’s main intent in the communication. Cutting each other some slack is the process of sensitizing to the most important issues, and desensitizing to the less important issues. The value here is: at work, the most important issue is smooth working.
e) Intent
When someone is speaking to you, the first thing you hear is the tone, the way in which something is said. Intent is usually the first thing you hear. The last thing you hear is the content. Most of us are taught that content is much more important than intent, yet if we watch our interactions with people, content is generally the last thing we hear in a sentence. Like it or not, we usually respond to each other emotionally first, and logically last. Because intent is often the first thing we hear, it is important to be conscious that we hear it, determine what the intent is, and purposely try to hear the content as well.
Being able to know when intent of a communication and when content of a communication should be put first is extremely important in communicating clearly. Developing that ability is key to and part of successful mentorship.
Embracing Equality
Surprisingly enough, for those used to the comfort of a more rigidly hierarchical system, embracing the idea of equality within the team may be difficult. Because less responsibility is required of individuals in a more hierarchical structure, the idea of achieving a certain type of equality with in the team may be overwhelming. The advantages, both professional and corporate, may not appear obvious. There may be some consternation at first as exactly what the new burden of responsibility entails is spelled out. Equality does carry the burden of heightened responsibility. It will be important to delineate the advantages on all levels, and point out the specific “new” responsibilities in a way that defuses any potential overload.
Understanding the Position Mentorship Occupies
Mentorship management is a response to the gaps in teamwork management.
Mentorship is not an attempt to “make nice” or make the “happy family” work environment. Mentorship management makes no attempt to impose a false family/friends structure. This is the real world. We aren’t going to be friends with everyone, or even react well to everyone. Mentorship provides the tools and responsibility to respond to those facts with integrity and leadership. Mentorship creates a work environment of respecting, responsible adults committed to making their jobs, and the jobs of their coworkers a success; both inclusive of and regardless of the personalities involved.
Job definition
A mentor’s job is to guard the learning experience, encourage their peers, and set an example, share knowledge and skills freely.
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