From Super Achiever to Mentor

By Jim Perrone

Most people who are successful in their roles as leaders, professionals, or technical experts have achieved success based on their own individual accomplishments. The self-concept of successful people almost always includes the descriptors: decisive, assertive, proactive, directive, confident, expressive, and even outspoken. However, this very self-concept can erect some challenging barriers for those achievers who aspire to be mentors.

In a very real sense, anyone in the position of being a mentor to someone else qualifies as one of these “super achievers.” If you are a mentor, you are probably accomplished in certain areas in which you can be of help to another. So in your sector of expertise, you have likely been a good problem solver and decision maker, and have probably been very focused on your individual contribution.

These traditional attributes of success – if not self-managed – can often be liabilities in a mentoring relationship. The mentoring partnership should be, by definition, person-centred and possibility focused. It is designed to help people select experiences to deepen their insight, shape strategic thinking, and find organizational success.

In a helping relationship, you as mentor should not always be a problem-solver, but be a catalyst who facilitates someone else's problem solving capacity. Mentors are often the listeners who empower mentees to arrive at effective conclusions or courses of action. Mentoring is about lighting a fire; mentors enhance the discovery process for mentees. Mentors don’t do the thinking, discovering, and learning for their mentees. This is why you must be conscious of the need to modify your self-concept and your role with mentees. In this unique learning partnership, you must come to see yourself as a developer of others rather than as a super achiever.

THE MENTOR'S CHOICE
Mentor Teaches And Advises	Mentor Offers Options	Mentee Solves, Mentor Assists	Mentee Solves
MENTEE'S EMPOWERMENT GROWS

Great mentors learn to listen as helpers, not as fixers or saviors. Fixers attack problems as obstacles to be overcome, saviors as wars to be won. As a successful mentor, you need to shift from focusing merely on the issue a mentee presents, and move instead toward exploring the mentee's problem with the issue. In doing this you become concerned with the mentee as a person more than you are obsessed with the puzzle of problem solving.

The cue to shift toward listening and empowering is not always clear. There are times when mentees require advice or recommendations for how to deal with an issue. There are other occasions when they can benefit from being provided a range of options to choose from. Sometimes mentees just need the guidance of an experienced hand. But the more you play the role of advisor, the more dependency you foster.

A Continuum of Choices

Mentors have a continuum of choices in working with mentees. Your choices about how to deal with mentees will impact the pace of their development.

These choices range from giving direct advice, through activities that increasingly shift responsibility toward mentees for thinking, discovery, and problem solving. The more that you use coaching skills to encourage and enable mentees to confront and solve their own issues and problems, the greater the growth and empowerment that will result.

As mentees respond to your advice and coaching, the pace of empowerment can be accelerated. One way that you can “wean” yourself from needing to be the authority and to solve every issue is to simply offer them an appropriate range of options to consider. This allows mentees to discern between choices and to begin to take on greater influence on possible solutions and actions.

Offering options prepares both you and the mentees to move further on their empowerment continuum. The empowerment objective is that they grow into confronting issues and problems more and more independently.

There is no single right choice for all situations; the appropriate choice of mentoring behavior depends on mentees’ growth requirements. What is appropriate in each mentor-mentee interaction is that you make a conscious choice about what is best for a mentee’s development in each specific situation. In order to be able to do this, you must remember: "This is not my problem.” You need to ask yourself if your approach will actually increase the mentee’s capacity to deal effectively with current issues and with like issues in the future.

By thrusting your mentees’ development needs to the forefront of your consciousness, you will find yourself gradually getting free of your need to address and solve their every problem and to teach them their every lesson. You will have made the shift from mere “super achiever” to “super mentor.”

Jim Perrone is a managing partner of Perrone-Ambrose Associates, Inc., an organization development firm that helps organizations create mentoring cultures. www.perrone-ambrose.com

Published in Networking Today, January 2002.