By Tim Schneider

The final role for the coaching leader is that of mentor. Mentoring has a lot of dynamics and sub-competencies and can be the most rewarding of all the coaching related activities.

At it’s core, mentoring is the growing of talent. Growing talent to take your place. Growing talent so you can be more easily promoted. Growing talent to ease your workload and increase team member satisfaction. Growing talent to increase your organizational influence by the promotion and transfer of people you have mentored. Growing talent to create a pool of succession for your organization.

The first mentoring dynamic is finding someone to mentor. This needs to be a collaborative operation. Not everyone you think will be a good successor wants to be mentored. Not everyone who wants to be mentored will be a good candidate for future promotion or advancement. The process needs to be available to all but utilized with only a few at a time. As a rule of thumb, you should only consider directly mentoring two people at any one time. You will have to conduct some courageous conversations with people to both encourage and dissuade participation in mentoring.

The reason that mentoring is done in plural with two people is because stuff happens. People quit. They may not be exactly what you thought they were. You need to have points of comparison and need to have choices when opportunities arise. Placing all of your mentoring stock in one candidate is risky and often backfires.

Identifying mentoring candidates will require you to do a little career counseling. You will need to discover what they want out of this job and their career in whole. What are they looking for and what are their key motivations and satisfaction points. This process is just like hiring for correct fit.

After you have identified a couple of mentoring candidates, the first step is to solidify relationships with them. Discover commonalities, reconcile differences in style and appearances and build bonds on a deeper level. This relationship base will further establish trust and communication comfort which is important in the mentoring process. Get to know the mentoring participants. Let them tell their stories. Know their biography. Both you and the mentored team member must feel good about expression and deeper communication intimacy.

The effective leader now wants to add some quality doses of storytelling. Not of the bedtime variety but the types of stories that reinforce how to be a successful leader. The challenges you faced. Things you have seen. Lessons you have learned. Not related in a I’m-The-Best-Thing-Since-White-Sliced-Bread type of approach but in narrative of lessons and matter-of-fact approach. This is uncomfortable for many leaders but priceless for those being mentored.

After relational and storytelling activities, the leader must begin the process of delegating, empowering and developing the mentoring participants. You must be able to let go of some key tasks, allow the team members to perform them using their techniques and styles and debrief their decisions and performance. Much more about this process in found in the Sheep Breeding Commandment.

Another powerful mentoring tool is job shadowing. This allows mentored participants to gain a feel and firsthand appreciation for higher level jobs and functions. Job shadowing should be done in a programmatic and long –term approach that gives a sustained look at the job.

The other key mentoring piece is to allow mentored team members to act in your behalf and for you at key meetings and during times of your absence. This is an important step of translating their learning from storytelling, delegation and job shadowing into the practical world of acting and performing. During any period when a mentored candidate acts for you, even if it is very brief, a debrief dialog is critical. This dialog is designed to see what went well and what could have been done better. When done in a non-comparing and non-judgmental form, this is a great form of learning for mentored participants.

Mentoring requires a good time commitment. A time commitment that is not always returned in the near term but an investment that will pay dividends to you and your organization for years to come.