Leadership and Mentoring: Using effective mentoring relationships to build great leaders.

On Wednesday 8 May nearly 40 people gathered at WelTec’s flash new hospitality school in Cuba St, Wellington, to listen to Carol Scholes from the NZ Coaching & Mentoring Centre speak about using mentoring as a tool to grow successful leaders.

Carol is a professional coach and mentor to executive clients both here and internationally. She is also a skilled facilitator, lecturer in governance and change management at Unitec and a trained mediator. This will be third year that Carol delivers superbly professional mentor/mentee training and review sessions for our National Mentoring Programme.

I thought it was time to bring Carol down and give others the benefit of listening to her speak. Her topic at this event was “Leadership and Mentoring”. She began by challenging us to think of the greatest leader we knew, and to identify the attributes that made them so. As well as trust, passion and authenticity, there was the comment that effective leaders have an open and transparent agenda.

In Carol’s experiences of working with governance boards, she finds that everyone has their own agenda when joining a board. Those boards that demonstrate the strongest leadership have an open agenda, where the organisation they represent understands what it is they and the board are actually there to do.

On the power of throwing a problem to a group to solve, Carol discussed some of the pros and cons of this approach. In all situations where the group is “left to it”, a leader tends to emerge and will have more influence on decisions than any other member of the group. This can mean that some people aren’t involved at all. A good problem-solving method, in Carol’s opinion, is to give the problem to a group but make them go off and individually work out an approach to solving the problem first; the next stage is to bring their answers back to the group. The leader then finds a way to bring these answers together.

One essential attribute of a leader is being truly self-aware. We all know about self-awareness, and probably most of us think our own levels are pretty good. But it’s easy to think that others see you the way you see yourself – dynamic, forward-thinking, humble, a great listener and so on. The critical factor is to understand the impact that you have on others. It’s not sufficient just to know your own strengths and weaknesses – you have to know your strengths and weaknesses as a leader. This means knowing when certain attributes become strengths and when they become weaknesses, which depends on the leadership context.

This is where mentoring comes in as a tool to develop your effectiveness as a leader. If effective leadership hinges on your sense of self-identity, a mentor can be the critical friend who will tell you the things you need to hear – both good and bad – that will develop your sense of self.

Mentoring is not about giving advice; it’s about drawing the leader out of the person and applying it to the context. The most successful leaders that Carol has encountered are those who are learning all the time, who carry an inquisitive attitude with them throughout life. A skilled mentor will ask those questions that challenge your patterns of thinking, your sense of self and how you think you impact others.

“Mentoring is not telling people what to do; it’s giving them a chance to examine what they are doing in light of their intentions.”

You can view Carol’s presentation on our website under the Central Branch:   Presentation PDF

Also see the national section of May e-news for information on the PMINZ National Mentoring Programme, which is just getting underway for 2013.

Caroline Donovan, National Mentoring Programme Coordinator, mentoring@pmi.org.nz