When you get to the top, you can't look to a mentor for all the answers. Problems are too complex and time consuming. Instead, find someone who looks for answers with you. You need a third opinion -- a thinking partner outside your company, often on retainer, who has no vested interest in anything except your success.
Ramon got his first leadership break when he became EVP of manufacturing at Coatings Worldwide, an industrial paints and adhesives business. But he found that his manufacturing teams were so siloed that they caused expensive production breaks. His first thought was to hire better people, but that would cost time and money with no guarantee of success. He knew he needed a different approach. Hearing Anesh, an experienced player in global manufacturing, speak at a conference gave him an idea. Ramon needed his breadth of experience, so he invited him to Coatings as a consultant and paid him to reframe and test the issues. "Anesh challenged my thinking and made me stretch to see areas I wouldn't have otherwise considered," he says. Anesh was a great mentor because he didn't have an agenda. He was an outsider, and he didn't have a solution he was trying to sell. This let him frame the questions differently and move beyond fault finding.
We tend to think of mentors purely in the context of work, but work is just part of your whole life. Holly, a software executive at General Electric, argues that you need mentors for each part of your life -- who, together, represent a personal board of directors. "The key to the personal board of directors is to make sure it is balanced," says Holly. "If it is all work and no family, then guess where your advice will be skewed? If you neglect one area of your PBOD, you will neglect that area of your life." If financial security, community, or spiritual life are important to you, find mentors for these, too. Having a personal board doesn't just enrich your life, it also protects you from a dependency on a single mentor. And it puts you in a strong position to evaluate where your mentoring relationships are thriving -- and when it's time for a change.
Choose a protege you can learn from, too -- someone who may give you some insight into different layers of your organization.
Don't commit to a mentorship if you can't invest the necessary time. Block out regular meetings, set goals, and plan on spending at least one hour a month.
Know what kind of mentor you are and concentrate on that role. Make sure you and your protege understand the limits on trust within an organization.
If you can't provide the third opinion to your protege, make sure he or she gets one from somewhere outside the company.
This lessens dependency and provides other growth opportunities. A network of mentors beats a single one and provides an outstanding model for leadership.
Memo to General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt: We hate to be the ones to tell you, but apparently there was a much easier way. The International Mentoring Network Organization (IMNO) is a nonprofit group devoted to helping early- and midcareer professionals connect with A-list mentors. Its idea is that everyone should be able to have access to the Welchian wisdom Immelt received. So IMNO founder Patrick Tedjamulia paired with two friends to reach out to bigfoot mentors, interview them, and share their knowledge with everyone at IMNO.org. Among their gets so far are, yes, Jack Welch, Larry Bossidy, even a storyboard artist from Spiderman 2 (IMNO refreshingly knows not everyone wants to be GE's CEO).
There are several ways to use IMNO.org. One is to interview your own mentor and post the transcript. Or you can choose a dream mentor and request that he or she sit for an interview. Or you can just read others' postings.
IMNO's transcripts offer several advantages over career-advice tomes, and most of the credit belongs to hungry mentees who don't beat around the bush about wanting to get ahead. For example, Bossidy was asked how to advance at GE (succeed in projects that touch a variety of industries) and when to jettison a good gig for a risky one (when you've learned all you can in a job).
Like any open-source project, the site is free. What you achieve with the advice, of course, could be invaluable.
-- Mike Brewster
Those who lead charmed professional lives might find a trusted career mentor in an office down the hall, or maybe even in the next cubicle. But how will you find that perfect sounding board if he or she toils hundreds -- or thousands -- of miles away?
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