Introduction

What, Why & When

Let’s avoid awkward introductions and get straight to the sales pitch.  Why does this blog exist and why is it worthy of your time?

The simple answer is that I am writing something that I wished existed earlier in my career.  The best description I can come up with is that this is a weekly mentoring resource that is available to anyone who cares to read it.  My aim is to help as many people be as successful as possible by giving away all the relevant information I know on the topic for free.

Now I need to dig a little deeper and take you on a journey in two directions.

I never really understood how mentoring was meant to work.  I have seen successful examples but, up until recently, I had never experienced them first-hand.  Businesses periodically get excited about mentoring because when it works well companies can more-effectively leverage their existing talent to help develop junior members of staff.  But it usually doesn’t work well and companies lose interest as a result.

Why doesn’t it work better?  The training on mentoring is well-meaning but not particularly helpful.  It typically walks the tightrope between leaving things as open as possible whilst being prescriptive so that there is some structure to work within.  The advice can range from statements such as: “the mentor should do less than 20% of the talking” and “the mentee should set the agenda and arrive with a clear objective”.  The advice evolves, but those were the rules I was offered when first given a mentor in my 20s.  That mentoring relationship lasted just 2 sessions before I concluded mentoring was a total waste of time.  The company offered me a new mentor whilst conceding my first mentor was not a particularly open business leader.  But I knew that wasn’t the problem (and was also very unfair on the manager who had offered up their time).

I am not going to spend too long here on mentoring because I will dedicate a later post on what makes good mentoring.  However, over the past 2 years I have stumbled into a professional relationship with three people who would call me their mentor.  Only one of those was officially assigned to me as a mentee, one approached me directly after a group meeting and another was formerly a direct report wanting to continue a regular catch-up.  As I have experimented with those three relationships I have had a few epiphanies: 1. mentoring works, 2. mentoring benefits the mentor as much as the mentee and 3. wouldn’t it be amazing if I could capture the benefits in a blog.

One of the biggest benefits to the mentor is the chance to reflect on the broad experience of adult life (both work and non-work) and distill from those experiences what worked well and what didn’t work well.  The more you reflect, the more puzzle pieces emerge on what actions/behaviors/culture led to success and which led towards less desirable outcomes.  Those puzzle pieces come naturally with anecdotes and stories that allow you to communicate them effectively to your mentees.  There is an instant feedback loop that lets you know if the idea you are communicating makes sense or needs refining/re-thinking.  Best yet, the discussion with the mentee that provoked a given reflection will come with their own experiences to help widen the thinking and the shared ideas on solutions.  Mentoring is not at all straight-forward and I mean that in two ways.  Firstly, the set-up (in my experience) is unlike any other business relationship and secondly the path you follow is not linear.  But, again, I promise I have a post coming that is dedicated to mentoring so I won’t cover that here.

But what emerged for me was a desire to share those puzzle pieces with a wider audience.  To scale up my mentoring to an online community.  I also allowed myself to imagine the potential for an engaged community if we can get the feedback loop working at scale, where thoughts and comments expand our thinking further.  If that happens, I will feel pretty satisfied and consider this project a success.

That leads me to the other part of the journey I wanted to introduce.  What does it mean to be “successful” or “as successful as possible”.  I will have a few blog posts on this topic because how we define success is critical.  I believe success is a subjective rather than objective quality and that one person’s view of success can be completely different to another’s.  It’s quite common to see someone be successful at one thing and fail at another.  What does this mean specifically for this blog?  It is not a blueprint for making lots more money quickly and I very much doubt I will discuss remuneration at all.  I won’t be telling you that you need a specific title to show you are successful.  Instead, I want to pass on my experiences and observations on how to be as effective as possible in whatever you choose to do.  This approach has frequently opened doors to new opportunities in my career.  For now, let’s just define being successful as being able to agree with the following statement: you like what you do and you take pleasure in doing it well.  We can work on expanding that as we progress. 

So that’s my introduction.  I have chosen Substack to host the blog and will be publicizing it on Linkedin.  This is part of the experimentation and I have a lot of thoughts on Linkedin usage that I intend to cover soon.  Given that I will be publicizing this on Linkedin, you will be able to see my career history and my connections.  I will not mention any company or person by name.  Examples given will be authentic and labelled as my experiences or experiences I have learnt from others.  I will give credit where I reference the published work or words of others. 

I would just like to offer a quick thank you to the 3 mentees mentioned earlier.  Specifically the mentee who was assigned me as their mentor.  The one hour per month that we spend chatting is one of the most enjoyable, interesting and satisfying parts of my work.

If you are interested in joining this journey please subscribe to my mailing list and this blog will be delivered weekly to your inbox.

Next week’s blog is on the rule that helped me improve my effectiveness at management: “Only Tell Me Twice”.