A friend brought up a point about the significance of mentors to managers. Important stuff, as good mentors are rare to come by and their advice can have far reaching effects on people development. We should count ourselves lucky if we get to meet a few in our life time and see them in action.
This kept me thinking for a while. I believe that we should choose our own mentors, like choosing our own heroes whose conviction and purpose in what they do become standards we would like to emulate. The problem is, what if they are not accessible to us?
My immediate response to this will be a place on a book shelf. Pick an author, a thinker who you can associate with and learn something from. Just think about all the life changing advice Peter Drucker could have told us if he was our own personal management mentor.
Sharing circles in the work place are important and cannot be substituted. We learn a lot faster from each other through the sharing of our experiences and we can get immediate support in the localised context of our work. But beyond that, great mentors are a lot more accessible on the book shelves.
1 comment:
A well-balanced perception on the approach to learning skills.
Looks like the source of learning resides within the individual more than the various external sources be them mentors, or books, or manuals.
The choice of learning approach or method is only as effective as the motivation and purpose towards learning. We can learn despite the quality of the trainer or training materials, despite the low quality of conference speaker, despite the shallowness of a book, despite the lack of quality mentors.
When we come across inspirational leaders, speakers, books and ideas we count them among our blessings.
This does not negate the necessity to provide sufficient scaffolding for new leaders to acquire fundamental skills to operate efficiently.
Herein lies the delicate balance between specific technical skills and generic leadership practices. Can't have one without the other.
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