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October 2005

Mentoring Is A Crucial Leadership Skill

Some people call it coaching. Others call it counseling. Still others call it mentoring. No matter what you label it, the ability to advise an individual on how to improve performance is a key leadership skill.

If you’re in management, mentoring is crucial because it’s the way you provide ongoing feedback about employee performance.

And we all know that employees perform better, and are more engaged in their work, when they have frequent feedback on how they’re doing.

Even if you’re not in management, mentoring is important because, as you’ve heard me say before, you don’t need a management position to be a leader, to exercise leadership.

So, as a leader, you should always be trying to bring out the best performance from those around you.

And, now that I think of it, another person you can mentor is your boss. Yes, that’s right, your boss. If nothing else, you need to let your boss know what you need from him or her so that you can do your best.

You might even have to mentor your boss on improving other areas of his or her performance. Now that’s a scary thought.

You do all this through mentoring, by providing feedback, insight, and advice about how an individual can improve his or her performance.

I’ve talked before about the importance of trust, and once again trust is crucial here, in the mentoring process. You see, people are more likely to listen to you, and take your advice, if they trust you, if they believe you have their best interests at heart.

And, they are more likely to confide in you, to provide the information you need to help them, when they have a high level of trust in you.

Mentoring really combines two essential skills, communicating and listening.

Let’s look first at communicating. You can have all the wisdom in the world, but if you can’t articulate it in a way that other people understand and accept, what good is that wisdom?

Keep in mind that communicating is not just verbal. It also includes the messages we send with body language, facial expression, and tone of voice. All must be consistent with our words.

Listening, as a skill, sounds a lot easier than it really is.
This is because a lot of people confuse hearing with listening. I can hear conversations going on around me, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m listening closely, intently.

And yet, if I’m going to be effective as a mentor, I must
develop my listening skill. We don’t listen with just our ears. We must also watch for subtle shadings of meaning that the other person communicates through nonverbal signals.

Listening is important because it’s how we discover and
understand the other person’s interior, personal feelings, so that we can help that person by providing sound advice.

All of us should have a passion for improvement. We should want to be better today than we were yesterday. We should want to be better tomorrow than we are today. Our passion for improvement should be contagious, so that it helps other people improve.

As leaders, that should be one of our goals in the workplace—to help people improve, to be the best they can be. But we can’t help people in this way if we aren’t good at mentoring.

Leadership is everyone’s business, and since mentoring is a crucial leadership skill, mentoring is everyone’s business, too.

Are you regarded as a mentor, as someone people go to for advice and counsel? What are you doing to build the trust necessary for a mentoring relationship? What are you doing to improve your ability to communicate? To listen effectively?

Until next edition, keep leading the way!

Copyright (C) 2005 by Terry Wall

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