Mentoring

At work you will meet two kinds of managers. Those that mentor and those that dont. I think there are huge advantages to mentoring and hope that the day will soon arrive when every person has a mentor.

A mentor is a midway position between a boss and a teacher. It is someone who helps more by way of example. (s)he should be able to manage people well and supervise their work to see if they are on the right track. Just delegating the work and following up to check on the closure status is not the same. You need to be involved, have the necessary know-how and be ready to help out if required.

Another important aspect of mentoring is for the mentor to have an open mind in disseminating knowledge. Don't treat the tricks you have learnt as a top secret, share your expertise with the mentee. It is good to see someone following in your footsteps or even taking after you!

Having good listening skills are also a must. As a mentor, you should not only listen, but also be able to understand the situation. You should never be overbearing or make your advice mandatory. Give the person room to disagree, your role is just to provide helpful suggestions not to enforce them.

As a mentor you should have excellent interpersonal skills. A wide range of experience can make you an interesting person to be with and to learn from. A good knowledge of the world and the way things work is necessary if you want people to look up to you.

Successful mentoring can bring about a drastic change in organisational working and culture. It can encourage new aspirants and minimise corporate jealousies thus making way for an open atmosphere where learning abounds both for the experienced and inexperienced alike.

Who gets the credit?

One of the most important aspects of managing a team is recognizing the contributions of the team and sharing credit appropriately. Responsibility and accountability comes from owning the mistakes and failures and not hogging the credit on successes.

It is of paramount importance that the team never gets a feeling that the manager or senior management is not fair in all transactions. One often sees managers socializing based on gender, culture or other interests and it is very important that this be controlled. I remember an episode from the TV serial "Friends" where Rachael takes up smoking to be around with the Boss because her boss and her colleague (who both smoke), keep taking all the decisions when they are at the smoking lounge. I am sure we all have witnessed this in some form or the other at our place of work.

There is no doubt that the manager, being at the helm of the team is the one who is responsible for everything that the team does. (S)he owns the successes as well as the failures, but it is alarming to see managers take responsibility only for the success and point to others when there is failure! Worst still is pointing to the team for the failures, then working with them to fix the failure and take the entire credit for the success!