Pass on the baton

This is the concluding post on my series On Mentoring.

In my last post, I talked about growing wings for people to fly. But despite my attempts, some of them did not make an attempt to fly. That was when I realized that as mentor it is not enough to grow wings, but also be the safety net for the people. They need to see and understand that there was a safety net below, when they try to fly and in case they fail, the net would protect them from crash landing.

I started talking to people to make them feel comfortable, to give them the required support to grow. Then came the next question - Am I doing the right things for people to grow? That was when I reflected back on the incident that my mentor told me about the need for me to grow, to help my team to grow. This changed my outlook of being a mentor from being a ladder (to what my tamil teacher said years back) to being an escalator. In the corporate world, the mentors need to be like escalators, taking people up and at the same they also need to keep moving up. 

The next step in my mentoring journey was to enable my people to become successful mentors. This was necessary, to ensure that there was a steady stream of mentors ready to grow people. It is like a relay race, the baton needs to be passed on to ensure that the next generation of mentors are ready as and when required. This was more difficult said than done. I had to tread a very careful path - I need to grow my leads as mentors for their leads, but at the same time, I should allow them to be natural rather than force my style on them. One of the important deeds of a leader, is to create more leaders who are natural with their own authentic style, rather than clones. It took me several ups and downs to ensure that that I passed on the baton that was given to me. But when I moved out, I felt pretty satisfied that I had indeed passed on the baton successfully.

To end this post on mentoring, a quote from Jack Welch - "Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others."

Until next week, take care.

ps: In my first post on mentoring, I had mentioned about something that I did not learn. It was to understand the readiness and the eagerness of the person who needs to be mentored. If the person is not ready or eager, no point in mentoring because it has a high degree of failure. After several discussions, nudges and pushes with one of my leads, he told me " raghu why are you trying to pull me in your direction, leave me alone, I know what I need to do." :-)

pps: based on feedback, no more bold words to highlight quick reads.. so people, you got to read full post :-)