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Mentoring Through Storytelling

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When your mentee asks you for your thoughts or advice, how do you respond?

Imagine you two are meeting at your regular spot, maybe your office during lunch, a coffee shop over the weekend, or (for those long-distance relationships) over the phone. Your mentee goes on describing a recent challenge they are facing and expresses that they are not sure what to do about it. Or maybe they describe a recently discovered leadership or skill gap and are trying to set a goal to address it. In either case, they end by asking for your advice. How do you respond?

For one, you can simply give advice. That’s why you’re their mentor, right?

Or you can guide the conversation to coach them through the issue, using questions to encourage their own self-discovery of what to do, rather than simply telling them what to do.

Or maybe you can just tell a story.More

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Toward a More Structured Approach to Mentoring

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Early in my career, mentorship was not an integral developmental activity for me. What I initially expected – mentors to approach me to establish formal, long-term relationships – did not in fact happen. I quickly found that work demands and the professional culture norm of busyness often prevented that happening for me as well as most others around me. But, I admit, I held a narrow view of what mentorship was back then, which led to the “six faces of mentorship” reflection shared a few weeks ago.More

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Three Ways Leaders Use Feedback to Create Developmental Experiences for Others

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Feedback is an essential component of all leaders’ developmental journey. Yet, despite feedback being a core part of any developmental plan and a topic widely researched within organizational behavior, leaders still struggle to effectively leverage this tool to develop others and improve their performance. Too often leaders’ use of feedback is either sparse, solely focused on assessment, or diluted; it becomes diluted when leaders attempt too much by pairing assessment with developmental feedback, which usually lands poorly on and confuses the person receiving it.More

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The Six Faces of Mentorship & Why You May Not Have Mentors Like You Desire

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In her fantastic book, Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg describes a conversation she had with a woman on her team while serving as the COO at Facebook:

“I never used the word ‘mentor,’ but I invested a lot of time in her development.

So I was surprised one day when she stated flatly that she had ‘never had a mentor or anyone really looking out’ for her. I asked what a mentor meant to her.

She explained that it would be someone she spoke to for at least an hour every week.

I smiled, thinking, ‘that’s not a mentor—that’s a therapist.’”

More

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Leaders Help Others Solve Problems. Here’s a Simple Tool to Assist.

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The late General (retired) Colin Powell – former Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, and Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – is popular for (among many things) making a statement regarding a leader’s obligation towards peoples’ problems:

“The day the soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help them or concluded that you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.”

While the statement addresses soldiers, it is a universal lesson in leadership – leaders help solve problems. Whether it be in a managerial role or as a mentor, leaders help others remove obstacles, achieve clarity on a path forward, and help enable and inspire action.

But one important aspect of leaders helping people solve problems, which seems to be less discussed, is HOW. How can leaders best help others solve problems, overcome challenges, and commit to a plan toward progress?More

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Two Important Developmental Tools Available to Every Leader (and Mentor)

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Have you ever hesitated to reach out to a boss or a mentor and ask for their time – maybe to seek out advice for a current challenge?

Do you feel like a burden when you do?

What about encountering distracted, seemingly aloof communication from a boss or mentor? Though likely unintentional, even the smallest signals can message that we are distracting our boss or mentor from more important things, or that we are not someone on their short list of people worth their time.More

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Self & Leader Development Through Goal Setting (from a Self-Identified Non-Goal Setter)

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“It is not enough to take steps which may someday lead to a goal; each step must be itself a goal and a step likewise.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I have an interesting relationship with productivity. Deep down I truly believe that productivity alone does not equate to success or value. I internalize a childhood lesson from my mom, “don’t confuse motion with progress,” and am a huge fan of my wife’s sweatshirt that reads, “your worth is not measured by your productivity.”

However, I have a bevy of passions – my faith, family, fatherhood, professional work, writing reflections on this platform, mentoring, self-development habits, and other interests like endurance running – that together require a lot of time. To successfully attend to all these passions, I have to be intentional and productive in how I spend my time. I often become frustrated if I find myself inadvertently ignoring any of these identities.

I believe others can relate to this productivity conundrum.More

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A Model for Retaining and Reflecting on What We Learn

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I believe one mark of an exceptional leader is a personal commitment to continuous self-development and learning. Running with this idea, let’s say you read one to two books a month for the purpose of development and learning. Additionally, you listen to an audiobook a month. You also listen to one to two podcasts a week. And you read a handful of blogs and articles each week. Great! I’d consider that quite a robust self-development habit of learning!

That’s also a lot of content to consume every week.

How do you extrapolate what is important and relevant from all that? Moreover, how do you record those ideas or lessons, retain them, organize them, or even reflect to keep them relevant months or years down the road? This is certainly a common challenge for those highly committed to self-development.More

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What Do We Actually Get from All This Reading?

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I recently had a wonderful conversation with a mentee of mine who is passionate about his development as a leader. Only two years into his career, he is already demonstrating a commitment to self-development that took me the better part of a decade to figure out. One of his current dilemmas, however, is worrying that he is over-consuming developmental content. He reads broadly, follows online journals and blogs, and listens to podcasts on a consistent basis. While I’m proud of his devotion to these important habits, he expressed concern that he is consuming too much and failing to retain, internalize, and ultimately apply much of what he learns. He’s not the only person I’ve talked to with this concern; this is also one that I often struggle with myself. I believe many of us are voracious consumers of a variety of great leader development content.

So, what do we (or should we) actually get from our reading and consumption of developmental content? I feel this dilemma is not unique; it is something many of us have thought about and is worth exploring.More

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4 Self-Development Activities We Should Be Doing

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How are you developing yourself as a leader?

How well can you answer this question? I’m sure some may respond with a deer-in-the-headlights look supported by initial “um, well…uh…” Many others are likely to respond by listing some books, articles, magazines, and/or blogs they’ve read recently – which is great!

But I think my next question would be: Awesome! What else?

I don’t offer this follow-on question judgmentally or pretentiously. I ask it with all the well-meaning intent I can. However, I think only reading and consuming developmental content, even in various available formats, is an insufficient model for self-development. It helps us to gain new information and perspectives for sure, but that alone does not help you process the information, clarify lessons or goals, integrate new approaches into your behavior, or assess growth or effectiveness of it all in your leadership.

Reading for development, while valuable, is insufficient alone for your self-development as a leader. A complete approach to our self-development requires the integration of four activities – goal setting and achievement, seeking feedback, broad knowledge gathering, and reflection. More

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