Being asked to be a mentor is a very humbling experience especially when the mentee is someone you look up to and respect more than they realize. Over the years, the experience of mentoring someone usually begins about the same way. Learning more about each other and discussing goals and objectives set the stage for what then transitions into a series of more challenging and thought provoking conversations. A well-prepared mentee will usually present questions which challenge and stimulate the mind in a way that the conversation benefits both the mentee and mentor while allowing both parties to reflect on what is really important.
Although we focus on a core set of values and principles to live by, the mind usually races to possible implications of the choices we have to make in our personal, family and career lives. It is usually not the destination and it’s characteristics that we struggle with, but the potential limitations or constraints of future possibilities we hate to address by making a strategic set of choices today. Without these choices, we fail to focus. Without focus, we are usually less successful. Focus does not limit your ability to shift gears to a new direction in the future. It simply improves your chances of success today and enhances the possible options you will have to pursue in the future.
Day to day decisions and choices we make are difficult to map to the strategic image of what we strive to be in the future. There are no real-time business intelligence dashboards readily available mapping our daily performance against goal when it comes to the things we say and do as we walk through life. We all need to schedule time in our lives to force ourselves to reflect, gather feedback and to do a sanity check to ensure what we are doing and what we want to be doing are in alignment. This is the best time of year for reflection. How do you gather constructive and objective feedback?
Extrapolate this entire conversation to the challenge facing an executive leadership team… and the challenge is exponentially more difficult. The larger the team is, the more challenging the process. For an organization to be hugely successful, the core values, goals, objectives, and focus must all be aligned as much as possible. Mentoring one individual and seeing the challenge of making strategic choices and the difficulty of monitoring one’s own performance provides huge insights into the struggle many executive teams face as they attempt to lead their organizations. How much time have they taken as a team to ensure they are all on the same page? How much time do they invest in monitoring the things they say and do as they lead the organization to ensure they lead as a team with a consistent message firmly based on a truly shared set of values, goals and objectives?