“Who’s Your Mentor?”
by Chris Reinhardt, feedlot specialist
We were all students once, and some of us still are students. Whether we’re 18 or 88, it doesn’t matter, we can still immerse ourselves in a topic and become smarter, better, and wiser. Psychologists all seem to agree that keeping our brain active is one key to staying mentally alert as we grow older. Many “seasoned citizens” take up word games, Sudoku, and brain teaser games as a daily exercise to keep their mind fit, just as they take up walking, swimming, or stretching classes to keep their body moving and limber.
Few managers would argue that they know all there is to know about their chosen profession, about leadership, about managing personnel, about managing money. And there is certainly no shortage of books, newsletters, seminars, and online short-courses in any of these topic areas to expand our knowledge base. And if you’re actively pursuing knowledge in these areas, kudos to you.
But there’s much less information on mentoring and mentorship. We understand the value of mentoring for young professionals and for new employees. We want the young industry people to get off on the right foot in their career, and we want our own new hires to get started in the organization knowing the internal systems.
One key to mentoring is that we don’t typically assign as mentor to our new hires the older worker who is a marginal worker or a known malcontent; instead, we try to marry up the new hire with the shining star of the organization, hoping to clone that success story.
Another aspect of mentoring is this: Who assigns the mentor to the Boss? If you’re the boss, have you assigned yourself a mentor? Even if you’re 40, 50, or 60, could you not still benefit from the hard-earned wisdom—not knowledge, but true wisdom—of an even more seasoned manager in a similar position within the industry as yourself. “Peer-to-peer learning,” which can come in many settings delivery methods, can provide some elements of this “senior mentoring,” but not all.
True mentoring goes perhaps one step deeper than simply providing best management practices. Mentoring requires an investment on the part of both the mentor and the mentee. The word “investment” infers that there is some type of up-front cost. A mentor needs to invest in the relationship so that both parties can trust that the mentor is going to be vulnerable and reveal where some of that hard-earned wisdom came from: mistakes. The other half of the equation is that for the mentee to gain full value from the mentor’s investment, the mentee needs to also be vulnerable enough to share those areas of weakness, where the mentor can step in and provide truth.
None of us is too old to learn valuable lessons, and what better way for a savvy, successful business manager to learn some of the more subtle and less measurable lessons of business then by spending extended time, over a period of years, from someone we trust, and who’s actually been through this same rodeo.