Modern Mentoring

INTRODUCTION

Inception

This book has been gestating in my mind for the last 35 years. For me, mentoring is very personal and rooted in my career history. Had I not had the persistent guidance and influence of a network of more experienced practitioners throughout my career, I feel confident that I would have been doomed to a life of underachievement. Just like the Grateful Dead took their experiences of traveling on the road and turned them into the lyric, What a long, strange trip it’s been, I likewise have been on a long quest to create more effective learning relationships.

I enlisted in the U.S. Navy right out of high school and became a fabricator and welder, following my father’s advice that I should learn a trade. My father was a machinist and my uncles worked in foundries or machine shops. My family was a living definition of the blue-collar worker. I had no idea what having a career meant; I was looking for a job. The navy helped me understand my unique capabilities and sent me to Nuclear Welding School, where I became certified to work on nuclear power plants. This event alone made me the most educated person in my family. I stayed in the navy for 10 years working exclusively on submarines. I have many wonderful and not so wonderful memories of my military service. I had no idea that I would eventually look back and recall all the important leadership and mentoring lessons that came from that time in my life. I’ll share some of these stories in later chapters.

Toward the end of my last hitch in the navy, I began to realize my life’s calling. As I looked back on my time in the military, I understood with certainty that I was more passionate about helping others develop than I was about fabrication or engineering. Leadership and leadership development became my all-consuming quest. I used my last two years in the navy to learn how to be a nonprofit leader and entrepreneur. I took a volunteer leadership position, which equated to a full-time nonpaying job, in a local organization focused on community development. I became immersed in small group leadership fundamentals.

Upon leaving the navy, I embarked on a six-year journey deep into nonprofit work. During those years I worked with and trained hundreds of leaders in North, Central, and South America. I earned my living in North America, and helped organize and lead medical relief and humanitarian aid trips to Central and South America. I also participated in three nonprofit startups. It was during this time in the nonprofit sector that the primary importance of mentoring began to grow clearer. Mentoring was very simple for me in those days. When I saw something in someone’s life that I wanted to emulate, I would ask him to help me get it. I cannot remember anyone turning down my request and I took great pleasure in learning from the passion of others. Before I left the nonprofit world, I had the pleasure of leading more than 400 volunteer leaders who were, in turn, leading others. I doubt I will ever have the opportunity to learn as much about the transformational effects of mentorship as I did then.

During this time I designed and conducted dozens of leadership incubator groups that I dubbed turbo groups. These peer-driven collaborative learning groups would serve as a blueprint for my life’s work. Today, I would call what happened in these emerging leadership groups modern mentoring. During the turbo group process, we would bring together a dozen emerging leaders and engage them in personalizing the principles of leadership behavior while leading community-based outreaches. We embraced learning-while-doing in a peer-to-peer, collaborative environment under the guidance of more experienced practitioners. There was a high degree of personal accountability in the form of sharing what was working and what was not. Creating these turbo groups had two immediate results: Those who were not serious about leadership dropped out quickly (about 35 percent), and those who stuck with the process emerged as confident leaders who made a difference.

My transition into working with for-profit organizations was not one that I would have predicted. In 1995, Tom Reed, a very close friend and mentor, approached me and asked if I would help him start up a training consultancy. The pitch that put me over the top and helped me commit to this new challenge went something like this, Randy, people in these large for-profit organizations are struggling in isolation. They feel cut off and adrift in their careers. We have the opportunity to bring purposeful learning to them. Tom’s words helped me understand the valuable service that we would be rendering to our clients.

So, I found myself co-founding Triple Creek (now River). For the first three to four years I learned how to create learning interventions for Global 1000 companies. I designed and delivered custom course content and curriculum, observational leadership assessments, performance management, and global learning processes.

This was during the rise of the e-learning revolution. We in the training profession were wrestling with the implications of the demise of the physical classroom. At Triple Creek, we had a burgeoning reputation as experiential trainers who relied solely on highly interactive course design and delivery. We licensed and supported hundreds of trainers who delivered our custom training. The thought of e-learning as a suitable replacement for our leadership courses was unfathomable. E-learning alone simply lacks context; and without context, course content is left to very limited perceptional understanding. So, when a major client asked me to design a course to help their midlevel leaders become better teachers, I immediately suggested that they allow me to create a scalable mentoring process instead. To my great surprise, they commissioned the project, and in 1999 Triple Creek created the first web-based mentoring software system. In 2000, we launched Open Mentoring (now River) as a commercially available e-mentoring software system.

During the last 14 years, I have had the pleasure of working with several hundred organizations as they sought to create more effective mentoring cultures. During that time, there have been many changes in the way that organizations view and apply mentoring. The message in this book represents the major lessons that I have learned during my career as I sought to help my clients create more productive learning environments.

My personal mission is to create a world of abundance and security through helping others to understand and practice modern mentoring. I hope you will join with me in making modern mentoring a more commonly used career development process.

1

Don’t Put Mentoring in a Box

If you want to do more with mentoring, you’ve opened the right book. If you dream of broadening the impact that mentoring can have on your organization or about creating a culture in which learning from others is an embedded behavior, my hope is that you will find your answers on these pages.

That said, before we can embark on creating a modern mentoring culture, we must first take mentoring out of the metaphorical box where corporations have placed it, and instead begin to practice it in a vastly different way. To help explain why we must take mentoring in a new, more meaningful direction, let me tell you a story.

During the time I spent doing leadership development work in the nonprofit world, I read Robert Clinton and Paul Stanley’s book, Connecting: The Mentoring Relationships You Need to Be Successful (1992). The larger message of this book ignited a passion in me that has inspired my life’s work. Clinton and Stanley argue that mentors are all around us, and that mentoring has always been a broad practice. Anytime you learn something from others that can help your personal development, you are participating in mentoring.

Their book broadened the way I think about how people can influence one another from a learning perspective. They made me ponder whether mentoring is so wide-ranging that it includes historical mentors, such as Plato, Buddha, or Confucious, whose works have influenced entire cultures; and deceased mentors, such as Einstein, Darwin, and Steve Jobs, who still shape the way modern society thinks, acts, and works. I asked myself: Is my boss my only mentor? Could my contemporaries who live halfway across the world be my mentors? What about my peers with whom I practice, or the subordinates I manage and am constantly learning from—are they also my mentors?

For me, the answer to these questions is a resounding yes. People all around me have mentored me in one way or another. I decided that I would learn how to effectively implement and institutionalize this concept of mentoring that, to me, is a learning process that is inclusionary, networked, and centered on sharing knowledge with others.

With this in mind, I began to apply this idea of mentoring and use it as a relationship-centered developmental process for the people I worked with on nonprofit projects in Latin America. In an effort to help volunteers develop into leaders more quickly, I created turbo leadership development groups, where people would connect, share, and learn from one another. To my delight, these turbo groups not only worked; they worked far better than the process I had used before. My volunteers learned quickly and effectively in this networked manner.

With the help of my friend and partner, Tom Reed, I soon had one of those moments that could be described as an epiphany—where a once out-of-focus future became ever so clear. I would bring my concept of mentoring to for-profit organizations so that they could leverage it to achieve more effective learning. I thought to myself: Imagine the power that unleashing this type of relationship-centered learning would have on the productivity and performance of an organization of 10,000, 20,000, or 100,000 people. What if organizations could start tapping into the collective knowledge of their workforce using this process? The results could be truly transformational. As a result, I created the first e-mentoring technology and started on my quest to embed mentoring and broad social learning into the fabric of my clients’ organizational cultures.

To my disillusionment, I discovered that while almost all organizations could see the benefits and agree with the broader concepts of mentoring as I saw it, the way they had traditionally been applying it in practice had made creating a new mentoring culture impossible. Mentoring took hold in the business world during the 1980s primarily as a way to advance diversity and inclusion efforts for women and minorities. There was (and still is) a lack of diversity in the upper levels of many organizations, and human resource departments attempted to address this issue by pairing up a female or minority employee with a hand-picked senior leader who could guide the protégé’s development. It was a laudable endeavor, but it affected an incredibly small number of people, typically around 1 percent of an organization. Corporations tried to address an enormous problem, which demanded more open social learning and knowledge sharing, with a very narrow and limited solution. Their efforts had unintended consequences—formalizing mentoring with rules and barriers to the point where it became exclusionary and extremely limited. In their application, corporations had unconsciously put mentoring in a box, and as a result put a lid on the benefits it could create.

Then as today, everyone in an organization could benefit from guidance from upper-level leaders (from people at all levels of the organization), but an organization’s leaders most certainly do not have time to mentor every employee. Setting mentoring programs up so that there are only as many mentees as there are upper-level leaders to mentor them leads to social justice issues in which some employees receive special treatment and opportunities, while others are left out. This exclusionary practice is counter to the broader mentoring ideals that would benefit employees the most.

The traditional approach to mentoring perpetuates the idea that mentors are special and only certain people are qualified enough to share knowledge. The reality is no one person can have all the answers. Pinning all of your career aspirations and expectations on one person is ludicrous. Our world changes so rapidly and is so complex that I would wager there