Mentor…who, me?

“Mentor: Someone whose hindsight can become your foresight”.

Not sure who said that, but I wish I had read it years ago. I’m not sure exactly when it was that I made the switch from “Wow, you are young to be in this role” to “Wow, I wish I could be you when I grow up” but it seemed to happen somewhere around my 38th birthday. Some of that had to do with the role I was in, and the way the company worked (we had a fairly well-formed mentorship program that encouraged that kind of engagement) but I think it was a shift in me as well – I could see other people going through some of the same challenges I had, and I wanted to help them out.

Casual mentorship is certainly something anyone can participate in, and basically it means finding someone who has done some thing you want to learn about, and asking them to help guide you through the same process. There aren’t any real rules to this kind of relationship, except that usually the mentor is older than the mentee, and usually the person looking for guidance is the instigator.

For me, though, I have come to take the notion of having a more formal mentoring relationship rather seriously.  While the casual mentorship arrangement is great, I think having a formal agreement with someone who is tasked with guiding you through a particular set of goals or milestones might help take the place of a teaching strategy we have moved away from as a society. For thousands of years we taught youngsters deliberately from the perspective of our experience, whether it be “here’s how to shoot a deer” or “don’t eat THAT one!”, but with the mechanization of our workplace that kind of hands on teaching has become rare. Training we do, teaching we do not.

Few companies have formal arrangements that encourage senior people to spend this kind of specific teaching time with junior folks who are coming up the ladder – in fact, some may see this as a career limiting maneuver, training your own replacement. To be clear, I am not talking about telling someone how to do something; I am talking about deliberately sharing your experience with someone junior to you. I would argue though that we have been learning this way since we were hunting and gathering, and the encoding for that kind of behavior still exists; the inclination is still there, and we should be using it.

To build truly strong teams that collaborate well, we need to work together up, down and sideways; mentorship is one mechanism that can get us there, and helps foster understanding between reporting lines and peers. Formalizing that relationship is one way of ensuring we are not only passing along institutional knowledge, we are also enabling the kind of 360 communication that builds powerful consensus both within departments and across companies. Beyond the benefits to the company, the impact on a junior employee can be profound. I will never forget my first mentor, and her prophetic words to me: “The best way to get people to understand the path you are on is to share it with them”. Works for me 🙂

Fight or flight in the modern age

When you find yourself in the shit, how are you going to react? Humans are complex creatures, and yet some times we can be boiled down to some very fundamental behaviors. Cultural anthropology teaches us that our ancestors learned to do two things when faced with (perceived) danger: we fought, or we ran.  In fact, most of the animal kingdom can be put in one of these two buckets (an eater or an eat-ee, as the situation dictates).

Depending on the situation, we as individuals will probably react in one of these two ways, and most of the time that’s probably pretty much OK. One place it may not go over well, though, is the workplace. Not much can be gained there by either of these reactions (at least not in a long term, sustainable way), so is there a third reaction that we can apply when faced with a challenging situation?

If we can school ourselves to wait, rather than react, there is another choice.  We can assist both ourselves, and the person we are interacting with, if we take this path. When faced with adversity, challenging conversations, even loss, what really counts is how we decide to behave. Do we strike back (fight) or go into denial (flee), or do we rise above the situation and take an action that we can look back on with pride? Taking a moment to pause and recognize that there is just as much going on inside the other person’s head as there is inside our own can be a powerful game changer.

Let’s use the example of  a confrontational meeting where one individual is dominating the discussion with their point of view, leaving no room for discussion or input. Your choices may seem to be limited. You can out shout them (fight) or sit in your chair silently seething (flee).  Neither one of those choices will probably get you what you (hopefully) want, a reasonable outcome everyone can live with.

So rather than take a page out of our ancestor’s books, try for a more reasoned approach.  Engage the other person without agenda, and work to find ways to be helpful and collaborative, while maintaining forward progress. Even if you don’t get to the outcome you want, you can walk away knowing that you put your best effort into a good resolution.

redexec summary? Act today in a manner that you will be proud of when you look back at it tomorrow.