Being A Mentor

Being A Mentor 

One of my favorite topics, what does it mean becoming a mentor. While the simple answer people would give is , Experience 😊, but is it just that.

Story: I have always been truly inspired by William Campbell, the great coach / mentor of the era. Once a employee in Kodak, later became VP of Marketing and board director for Apple Inc. , CEO for Claris, Intuit, and GO Corporation. Campbell coached some of the greatest leaders of the generation, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg and Sundar Pichai at Google, Steve Jobs at Apple, Brad Smith at Intuit, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, John Donahoe at eBay, Marissa Mayer at Yahoo, Dick Costolo at Twitter, and Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook. 

Did Campbell had a magic pill for everyone to succeed 😊, what was the real deal ? If you go through his journey with all these leaders, one thing that you would notice, all these leaders are different, very different. 
So what was the secret sauce for his success as a mentor,  One thing he truly believed was mentoring is never about putting greatness in someone, it always about recognizing greatness in someone and helping it emerge. That's what he did with all the people he coached.

Being A Mentor is not about replicating yourself as you are great in something & the other is not. Its also not about giving something to someone - its about getting something out from someone. Most of times today, when we look for a mentor for a engineer , a manager etc, we try to find a great a great engineer or a great manager to mentor believing the mentor will make the mentee as good as him/her. You must differentiate between a trainer vs a mentor, lot of times leaders tend to have expectation of a trainer from a mentor, which may give you tactical wins in a particular setup but sadly does not actually serve the purpose of having a "mentor". It's always about getting someone realize their own greatness and your experience helping him /her to discover and use it appropriately to ones success. 

One of the key aspects for a mentor-mentee relationship to succeed is trust, lot of times i have personally seen the mentor-mentee relationship failing just because there was lack of trust between them. Its the foundation for the overall engagement to succeed.

Morale: Being a mentor is a loaded responsibility, don't take it casually. Its not about your greatness, its about him/her realizing their own greatness with your help. 

Tips:

Myths to Mentorship -

• I will help when he/she asks for it
• I need to make his strengths as of mine
• Mentoring is easy
• My goal is to get him / her hired - promoted

As Mentor, Its always about leaning forward to help!

What does it truly mean -

• Mentoring is helping the individual discover his / her strengths and not understanding your strengths
• As a mentor one needs to also help discover persons weak links and help him/her to offset with strengths he/she has. No one can be good on everything
• Being a true Mentor is not a transaction, it’s a relationship, build affiliation
• Try to learn from your mentees, they can prove to be great teachers for you to be better. We call this reverse mentorship