When I started my first job with management responsibility, I had no idea what I would be facing. Of course, I had already experienced leadership. I had taken on temporary and situational responsibility in projects myself. But the full working day was completely new.
As a result, I was overwhelmed by the day-to-day business of managing. I had to deal with it at the same time as arriving at the new company. At the same time, I got to know the people, the industry and the products.
Familiarization
I was trained: Department round. Rules, procedures, customs. Documents, official channels and parallel paths. And then I realized: I need someone to help me find my own way here. Someone who doesn't set my goals and who doesn't decide my salary. But someone who knows what works and what doesn't. In short, I looked for a mentor. I simply chose and asked the person based on likeability and presumed standing in the company. In hindsight, that was one of the smartest moves I made in my first three years as a manager.
Mentoring plays a central role in the training and development of managers. The literature and research have been pretty much in agreement on this for years, see for example the "Handbook of Mentoring at Work". Mentors also appear in the biographies of successful national and corporate leaders. The aim is always to benefit directly from the mentor's experience and to grow by dealing with the issues raised by the mentor. However, mentoring is less common in the formalized development paths for managers in the business world.
Formal further training
As a junior manager, I took part in the Group's own management training program. It was designed according to all the rules of the art and was a success. It was varied, covered modern leadership models and was interactive. In projects, we worked on leadership aspects in other departments that were the inspiration. And yet there was a great distance to the reality we experienced.
My mentor in particular helped me through endless and seemingly absurd management meetings. We talked about external shame, anger and confusion. He gave me tips on when to talk and when to keep quiet, who to meet and how, and where the traps are.
Effort for mentoring
Based on this experience, I don't understand how mentoring can be considered too time-consuming or expensive.
Being a mentor to a prospective manager takes time - of course. Mentoring is an investment that has to be made by someone particularly expensive and valuable. You can shy away from these costs if it seems more important that the mentor closes deals, looks after customers or is otherwise effective in the interests of the company. However, developing potential in people can also have a high ROI.
Mentoring risk
Not all of my colleagues liked the fact that I had a mentor.
Mentoring can easily smell of officially sanctioned favoritism. It can give the impression that a "rope team" or even a network is being set up, from which others suffer because they do not enjoy its benefits. This is based on a false view of mentoring. But even the impression that mentoring could lead to asymmetry is poison in the corporate culture - unless the culture is one of bickering and stabbing anyway. Openness and access to mentoring for everyone helps to counteract this.
Mentoring as a non-process
HR was not involved in my mentoring at all. My mentor took the time for me and enjoyed supporting me. Mentoring was not an official role; as far as I know, it was neither rewarded nor thanked.
Presumably, process thinking in HR makes it difficult to deal with mentoring. Mentoring is very individual and is difficult to squeeze into an HR process. Apart from finding a mentor and agreeing the mentoring relationship, there are no significant generalizable steps in mentoring. In contrast, a multi-component FC training course with a certificate, with implementation in modules, sub-goals and performance records offers results that are easy to count and measure.
It may therefore be the effort involved, the concern about perceived injustice and the individuality of mentoring that deprive this training element of the importance it deserves.
Benefits of mentoring
In my experience, there is a lot to be said for mentoring:
Mentoring trains emotional and social skills in an intimate personal relationship. It therefore complements the practical, rational and communicative skills that are the subject of traditional management training. Reflecting on and discussing one's own emotional ups and downs in new responsibilities creates stability in the face of external dynamics. There is also room for discussing personal tactics. Against the background of the mentor's experience and on the basis of the shared corporate culture, there is room for moral comparison and the development of one's own leadership attitude.
The first team I had to lead comprised a good 40 employees. They were 300 km away at a different location and had an experienced, local boss. My management span was therefore 1:1 and I was allowed to practise "remote" long before Covid-19 forced this on us all. He and I managed this situation well together.
Today I think that at times I was more of a mentor to him than a superior, because I discussed my impressions of management work at head office with him. Due to his experience, he was already better at operational management than I was.
Learning by teaching
My own mentor later became my boss. Even after I left, we stayed in contact for many years. I believe that the mentoring was also "worth it" for him.
Mentoring serves an aspect of further development that is difficult to achieve with other tools. Both learn in the process. The less experienced person should learn from the experienced person. But the benefit arises in dialog and on both sides. Just like in partner work during a presentation at school. Or as with pair programming in IT teams, the mentor-mentee duo is a learning team in management work.
The intention and agreement is that the mentee gets help from the mentor. However, the mentor, who "knows how it's done and how it works here", is prompted by the mentee's questions to think through his own patterns of success in relation to the mentee. In doing so, they look at themselves and their own actions from a different perspective. The mentoring enriches both participants in the dialog.
Reciprocal mentoring
These arguments lead me to the proposal of double mentoring: because of its effectiveness and internal availability, mentoring should be better established and thus become more commonplace.
The manager being mentored should also be a mentor for someone else in the company. This concept is based on the idea that the person who learns best is the one who has to teach someone else.
Managers who want to become more reflective and willing to learn should not just enjoy the mentoring they receive. They can also pass on their own experience to someone less experienced. This closes the learning loop. It balances teaching and learning so that changes in perspective are more confident.
A fortunate combination of my own initiative and external support allowed me to experience mentoring, which I only later understood the inner connections of theoretically. I am now making them the subject of Management training. My advocacy of mentoring is based on my own positive experience. The positive effect of mentoring has been confirmed by managers whom I have subsequently advised.
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