Chapter 14

Leaders as Mentors and Teachers:
Time-Tested Leadership Development Strategies

Edward Betof

In This Chapter

• Mentoring and teaching by leaders is a time-tested leadership development strategy dating back centuries before the birth of Christ.
• The six primary benefits of leaders serving as mentors and teachers.
• Organizations gain competitive advantages when their experienced leaders serve as mentors and teachers for both nascent leaders and their overall workforce.
• Five mentoring formats for leaders serving as teachers and mentors.

 

What do the following individuals, groups, and professionals have in common?

• great philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates from the Golden Age of Greece
• elders, shamans, or medicine men from early native civilizations
• leaders of the great religions over the centuries
• artisans or skilled craftsmen beginning in the Middle Ages
• Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, and 4H leaders in the 20th and 21st centuries
• experienced physicians and nurses through the history of medical education
• labor union craft masters and foremen
• senior military and law enforcement personnel for many hundreds of years
• contemporary business leaders in selected high-performance companies
• great elementary school and university educators
• athletic and performance arts coaches
• sage friends and trusted advisers
• parents and grandparents.

The common element for all these is that they are examples of leaders who have served as mentors and teachers. Simply defined, mentoring is the helping and guiding of an individual’s development.

Leaders have served as mentors and teachers since centuries before the birth of Christ in ancient civilizations around the globe. Basic means of survival, customs, and traditions were taught by elders to the young. The great religions passed their teachings from one generation to another. From these teachers, leaders emerged and continued the cycle of teaching– learning–surviving–thriving.

Mentoring and teaching are centuries-old strategies for the development of leaders that have withstood the test of time. As a documented developmental strategy, mentoring dates back to the Greek poet Homer’s epic, the Odyssey. In fact, the word “mentor” comes from the Greek word meaning enduring and is derived from the name of a person who appears in this classic epic. As Odysseus (Ulysses, in the Latin translation) readied himself to leave and fight in what was to become the 10-year-long Trojan War, he is faced with leaving his young son and only heir, Telemachus, behind. Telemachus is unprepared to assume the crown, so Odysseus enlists the help of a trusted and experienced family friend named Mentor to be his son’s teacher and guide. Mentor became the key developmental resource and, in effect, his guidance and teaching became the key developmental strategy that was employed to help Telemachus learn to be a leader and, eventually, the king.

This brief history lesson is a window into the importance, dynamics, and the staying power of successful mentoring and teaching experiences. It provides insight into several key characteristics of excellent leader-mentors and teachers. Effective mentors, and to a large degree teachers, share knowledge, experience, perspective, and counsel. They are also sensitive to others’ needs and personalities, which enables them to establish, build, and sustain supportive, trusting, and confidential relationships. In short, they are trusted advisers who create opportunities for learning, growth, development, and positive change in others. The examples of individuals, groups, and professionals listed above are models of these characteristics.

Now dial forward from the ancient civilizations to today’s complex organizations with their need and inherent competition for talented leaders. Leaders who serve as mentors, teachers, and coaches are vital organizational resources who support the development of current and emerging managers and executives. The use of mentors and leader-teachers can be a highly effective leadership development strategy. This is particularly the case when these approaches are used to complement a sound job challenge and assignment-based approach for the growth and development of leaders.

Leader-mentors and teachers are highly valued in many contemporary businesses, government, educational, and human services organizations. However, despite the demonstrated and time-tested value of leaders serving as mentors and teachers, many organizations place themselves at a competitive or talent disadvantage by failing to utilize these developmental resource people, who are typically experienced, motivated, and highly engaged. These can be lost developmental opportunities for many organizations—but usually not for those that have established themselves as best in class for the development of leaders.

The Six Major Benefits of Leader-Mentors and Teachers

Many organizations now use some form of a leader-mentor or leader-teacher approach as part of their leadership development and learning initiatives. These approaches can take many forms and are described later in this chapter. But when their leaders serve as mentors and teachers, on a small or large scale, organizations gain these six primary benefits:

• Helps drive business results.
• Stimulates the learning and development of leaders and associates.
• Improves the leadership perspective and skills of those who teach.
• Strengthens the organizational culture and communications.
• Promotes positive business and organizational change.
• Reduces costs by leveraging top talent.

This chapter focuses on two of these business and organizational benefits when leaders serve as mentors and leaders:

• Stimulates the learning and development of leaders and associates.
• Improves the leadership perspective and skills of those who teach.

Stimulating the Learning and Development of Leaders and Associates

A key reason to implement a leaders-as-mentors-and-teachers approach is that it is a catalyst for the learning and development of the leaders and associates who participate as men-tees, protégés, or learners in mentoring, development, or learning programs. This dynamic occurs in three ways: role modeling, creating a safe environment for feedback, and building networks (Betof 2009).

Role Modeling

One of the most meaningful ways learners experience what is really important in an organization is through role modeling by their leaders. Imagine the impact of your CEO, presidents of global or national businesses, school superintendents, and functional leaders when they are perceived as dedicated mentors, teachers, and role models by leaders in their respective organizations. In a more formal teaching mode, imagine further the effect of these same leaders teaching principles of leadership and strategy and candidly addressing other topics that are vital to the success of their organizations.

The impressions made and lessons learned by leaders and professionals in mentoring and teaching-learning scenarios like these are vital to the success of any business, educational, governmental, or human service organization. Call it matching word and deed or walking the talk. The impressions are bold, and they can have a long-lasting, positive impact. When executives and administrators are also mentors and teachers, leaders who work under their influence, guidance, and direction benefit in many important ways. They will deeply understand business and organizational strategy as well as key priorities and how to address them. They often also receive invaluable input that can affect their career hopes and aspirations. And crucially, they also learn what is important about an organization’s culture. This helps to accelerate the learning and development of leaders as well as helping to provide insulation from both common and organizationally specific career derailment factors. The impact that positive role models such as mentors and leader-teachers have tends to stay with mentees, protégés, and learners for many years.

Ask any leader this question: Who are the top five people who have most influenced your career, and possibly even your lives? Also ask: What did they do to influence you, and how did they do it?

As leaders answer these questions, you are very likely to hear enthusiastic stories about caring people who took a great interest in others and who served as mentors, teachers, guides, and coaches. The lessons learned are very durable. Additionally, these lessons have a ripple effect on others. Leaders who are valued as mentors and teachers by others are some of the most important role models in leaders’ lives.

Creating a Safe Environment for Input and Feedback

Leaders have opportunities to gain perspective and learn from the experience of mentors and leader-teachers who take an authentic interest in them as unique and valued individuals. They are able to test their ideas and assumptions about their business and organizational strategies, their ideas for innovation, and how to handle particularly difficult or sensitive people situations.

Perhaps most important, they can also find a safe haven for testing their ideas about their own career development. They are also able to learn from and react to ideas concerning their development posed by their mentors. In some mentoring situations, these can be ideas that the mentee might not have even considered. This is the effect of mentors when they provide a trusting yet challenging and confidential environment that a mentee may not find elsewhere.

By its very nature, leadership development is the land of the uncomfortable, a term coined by the leadership expert Bob Eichinger. This is especially true in big, stretching, tough, and unfamiliar across-the-grain leadership roles. As a development strategy, in most situations, high-challenge, assignment-based development has been demonstrated to have the greatest potential for the growth of leaders. As a complement to this kind of challenging assignment- based development, mentors can have some of their greatest impact, in at least two ways. The first is by providing a longer-term career perspective of how such an assignment fits into one’s overall development, no matter how tenuous or even scary the challenge may feel in the short term. The second way is when mentors provide input and feedback in a manner that shapes a leader’s understanding of himself or herself. This desired effect happens because of the respect that the leader has for the mentor’s courage, candor, and actions.

When executives teach courses as part of an organization’s leadership development curriculum, leaders are able to consider ideas and practice skills and behaviors in other types of challenging yet safe environments conducive to development and learning. Leaders in these situations are able to obtain candid feedback from leader-teachers as well as peers before trying to implement them in their real work settings.

Also, in these types of learning environments, participants have opportunities to hear from, have ideas sparked by, and interact with leaders other than those with whom they regularly work. There are many advantages when leaders teach institutional knowledge, cultural expectations, and skills expected of managers and associates. When these are considered and practiced in the classroom, learners are able to try out what is uncomfortable and hear perspectives and receive feedback in a place other than their normal work settings. Ideas can be tested to determine if they are practical. Skills can be practiced.

When leaders teach in these kinds of situations, they are able to provide points of view and observations that have an inherent value often greater than what professional trainers can add by themselves. The combination of leader-teachers who co-train with learning and development professionals may provide the best of both worlds for leaders in a learning mode. In these types of facilitated teaching and learning environments, learners have an opportunity to assess their ideas and creatively explore possible solutions to the problems and challenges they face every day with leader-teachers and learning professionals, both of whom can serve as short-term mentors, coaches, facilitators, and advisers in and outside the classroom.

Building Networks

In both mentoring and teaching settings, mentees and learners have opportunities to build important networks with leader-mentors and teachers who can be resources for helping them with current and future leadership challenges. These relationships can be helpful in other ways as well. One common area is in the exploration of career growth possibilities and in making difficult career and career-related life decisions. These could include decisions about leadership experiences to be gained and roles to pursue, accept, or turn down.

These kinds of decisions might also involve possible relocations, expatriations, or taking on any other types of expanded responsibilities that could affect the nature of one’s family, relationships, health, or available time for other valued aspects of one’s life. On a team or organizational level, these types of meaningful networks and interactions with leader-mentors and teachers can foster a robust learning and developmental culture that is so important in building strong leaders and talent pipelines.

As leadership networks expand within organizations as a result of leadership development experiences, mentees and learners also have opportunities to make positive impressions on those leaders who are mentors and who teach. In addition to being identified as mentees and learners, sometimes by nomination for selected programs, these same emerging leaders may have opportunities to co-teach with more experienced leaders. They may, themselves, assume mentoring roles and become part of mentoring networks, which further increases the likelihood of additional interactions and visibility with senior or more experienced leaders. It is not uncommon for relationships to form in these types of situations that can have a profound and lasting impact on an individual’s career.

In addition, in many organizations senior leaders are talent scouts looking for leadership capabilities to meet the challenges of their organization through various talent management and succession planning processes. Mentoring and teaching situations can create opportunities to identify talent further along in the pipeline or elsewhere in the organization that simply would not have occurred had the mentoring and teaching not been done. This kind of organizational matchmaking often happens naturally, whether or not it is a stated goal of mentoring or leader-teacher processes.

Conversely, mentees and learners also have opportunities to do reverse talent scouting of more senior leaders in the organization, whom they might later ask to become mentors or, when the timing is right, with whom they might seek opportunities for new roles in their respective teams or organizations. This type of multidirectional talent scouting can be a very healthy dynamic in an age of employee free agency and at a time when employees are increasingly being asked to assume primary responsibility for their career development. Whether or not it is a stated goal of mentoring and leader-teacher programs, organizations with strong mentoring and leader-teacher processes can help create and add to the conditions that foster high employee performance and the retention of top talent, in addition to explicitly helping to build a strong leadership pipeline.

Improving the Leadership Perspective and Skills of Mentors and Those Who Teach

Stimulating the learning and development of leaders and associates has been described above as one of the key business and organizational benefits when leaders serve as mentors and teachers. A second key benefit is that it improves the leadership perspective and skills of the leader-mentors and teachers themselves.

These benefits are realized in at least five ways. First, when leaders are mentors and teachers, they crystallize and then communicate their most strongly held beliefs on a range of important leadership and business topics. Then they must hone and polish the way they articulate these ideas, strategies, and values to be able share their perspectives and the lessons they have learned from their years of successes, disappointments, and even failures.

Consider the value gained by mentors and leader-teachers as they sharpen their leadership perspectives on vital topics such as

• keys to growing a business
• exceeding customer expectations
• how to achieve one’s potential
• how teams or organizations can work at very high levels
• the values and ethics essential for success
• the role that mentoring, teaching, and coaching have in bringing out the best in others
• the role of courage and fierce resolve in achieving goals
• the place that humility has in successes and effectiveness in working with others.

Many mentors and leader-teachers report that they are better able to model their desired leadership behaviors in their full-time role as a result of their preparation and actual performance as mentors and teachers. Mentors first need to be clear and honest with themselves about their own points of view, behaviors, and skills to serve in the role of trusted advisers to other leaders. Additionally, when leaders prepare to teach others, they learn the content of the program—either the actual specific content or the leadership, management, and functional or technical concepts that underlie the program—more deeply than they had previously. These, of course, are for the most part the same concepts they are expected by others and expect themselves to model in their actual work.

Second, mentors and leader-teachers frequently move out of their comfort zone. Job challenges of different types, sizes, shapes, and intensities are the “genetic material” that enables leaders to learn, grow, change, and develop. For many leaders, mentoring and teaching is a very significant job challenge—it requires many leaders to step out of their comfort zone and to work across the grain of what they do best and most frequently. Some leaders may be mentors for the first time. They may also be in a mentoring relationship with leaders who have very different backgrounds, work preferences, or value systems than their own. They may be called on to provide advice and counsel on sensitive topics with which they are uncomfortable. Advice on career or even strategic issues may require the mentors to deal with areas where they have less experience. Each of these situations and many others stretch one’s comfort zones and are frequently developmental and growth-enhancing experiences for mentors.

There are additional reasons why teaching for leaders can also be a significant growth experience. Sometimes leader-teachers must teach or facilitate the teaching of content areas that are new, different, or even uncomfortable and strange for them. Experiences like this stimulate their learning and development. For experienced leader-teachers, teaching can also be a learning and developmental experience of a different kind. For example, this might occur when they teach others with whom they are not familiar or who work in functions or areas of the company where they have little or no exposure. They may need to handle unanticipated issues that arise in class with which they may not be comfortable and for which they may not have had any time to prepare. To teach effectively, leader-teachers must simultaneously be firm in their convictions and spontaneous and agile in their thinking.

Third, mentors and leader-teachers often come away from their mentoring and teaching assignments with a much more grounded approach to what is really going on in the organization and what others are thinking. These are information and organizational perspectives that they likely would not have gained had they not offered their time and experience as a mentor and as leader-teacher.

Fourth, mentoring and teaching encourages self-improvement by reducing the dissonance between what they say or teach and what they actually do and how they act in their leadership role. Leaders regularly report that they feel a strong responsibility to model in their roles what they teach and share as mentors or in a classroom. Whether it is a sense of responsibility, personal learning, pride, or even guilt, leader-teachers benefit and often grow by reducing or eliminating any gap between what they say and teach and the way they act on a daily basis. I have frequently heard individuals report that they are better leaders as a result of teaching. The same can be said about their mentoring experiences as well. They are clearer about where they stand on issues, and they often improve their ability to speak on issues for which they take positions or feel strongly. Consistently, mentors and leader-teachers report that they do not like the dissonance of saying and teaching one thing and doing something else. So almost all remove the dissonance by continuing to mentor and teach but by also improving how they perform day to day.

Fifth, mentors and leader-teachers can learn by being members of developmental communities of practice. Mentors can share what they learn and, without breaching confidentiality, develop and become better mentors by understanding how others deal with their mentoring and teaching responsibilities. Leader-teachers can co-teach with other leaders. They often share and discuss program content before, certainly during, and frequently after the program has ended. Co-trainers or teachers make self-corrections to improve their own teaching. As trust builds, they make suggestions and exchange teaching feedback with fellow leader-teachers. Also, a remarkable number of learning and developmental opportunities arise when leader-teachers take advantage of the available informal time to interact with fellow leader-teachers as well as students. Frequently, these opportunities occur during trips to and from programs, while leader-teachers are having discussions between themselves as learners and are involved in group discussions, problem-solving activities, or case study work, and during breaks and after-hour sessions.

From Homer’s Odyssey to Mentoring for the Masses: Examples of Different Forms of Leadership Development Mentoring Formats

From its documented roots in Homer’s Odyssey in ancient Greece to today’s Web 2.0 technology-enabled social learning, the mentoring of leaders for developmental purposes has taken many forms. Though there are more than 50 ways in which leaders can contribute as teachers, the remainder of this chapter focuses on five examples or approaches to mentoring (Betof 2009).

Historically, the most common mentoring method has been a one-to-one relationship between mentor and mentee, sometimes called a protégé. There are also group mentoring processes. Developed more than a decade ago, a third mentoring method is referred to as mentoring circles, which is a type of group mentoring approach that uses a very specific format and protocol. Still another group mentoring approach is called a peer assist. A fifth, and most recent, form of mentoring is technologically enabled and can involve considerably larger numbers of mentors and mentees than more traditional approaches. It can also have an open system of information sharing. All forms of mentoring are designed to be inherently developmental for leaders and professionals. Let’s look very briefly at each of these approaches.

One-to-one relationship between mentor and mentee: Dating back to the original documented relationship between Mentor and Telemachus, individualized mentoring relationships have benefited leaders and future leaders for centuries. At their best, this and other forms of mentoring are goal specific and time bound. Although some one-to-one mentoring relationships continue for many years because they are mutually satisfying and productive, typically, they last from several months to one or possibly two years. Individualized mentoring can be combined with or could also be an offshoot of some form of group mentoring.

Group mentoring formats facilitate opportunities for one or several mentors to provide guidance and support for an intact group or team of mentees. Though possibly not as personalized as one-to-one mentoring, it does begin to address the issue of having only a very limited number of people being mentored in individualized settings.

Mentoring circles typically utilize an experienced mentor with an ongoing group of protégés for a defined time such as nine or 12 months. In addition to sage advice from the mentor, mentoring circles have the advantage of using peer mentoring and coaching. There is usually a defined format or topic for each mentoring circle session.

Peer assist is a unique variation of group or peer mentoring. The peer assist methodology applies the power of an intact group or a team’s experience to one person’s challenge, problem, or opportunity. In a carefully facilitated format, a typical peer assist group mentoring session takes approximately one to two hours.

The most recent form of mentoring uses current advances in social networking and social learning. It combines these advances with Web 2.0 technology so that a small or larger number of mentors can reach significantly larger numbers—the “masses”—of mentees who may be in numerous locations and time zones. A broader adaptation of this approach uses social learning technology combined with the best practices of mentoring and knowledge management for just-in-time knowledge and resource sharing for potentially very large numbers of employees.

This chapter has concluded with brief descriptions of five different formats for individual and group mentoring. Each of these is designed to enhance the development of leaders in organizational settings, ranging from businesses to schools to human service and governmental organizations. Thus, mentoring and teaching form a key element of leadership development, whether one is a mentor or a recipient of the mentoring.

Further Reading

Chip R. Bell, Managers as Mentors: Building Partnerships for Learning. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1996.

Laura M. Francis, “Shifting the Shape of Mentoring,” T+D, September 2009, 36–40; www.3creek.com/resources/research/TD_Sep09.pdf.

Susan H. Gebelein and others, eds., The Successful Manager’s Handbook. Minneapolis: Personnel Decisions International, 2005.

John C. Maxwell, Mentoring 101. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2008.

Carson Pue, Mentoring Leaders: Wisdom for Developing Character, Calling, and Competency. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2005.

Reference

Betof, E. 2009. Leaders as Teachers: Unlock the Teaching Potential of Your Company’s Best and Brightest. Alexandria, VA: ASTD Press; San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.

About the Author

Edward Betof is a member of the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, where he is the senior fellow and an academic director for the first-of-its-kind doctoral program at a major university designed for the preparation of chief learning officers. Previously, he served as vice president for talent management and chief learning officer at BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company). He is a faculty member of the Institute for Management Studies. He is the author of Leaders as Teachers (ASTD Press and Berrett-Koehler) and the lead author of Just Promoted! (McGraw-Hill). He served a three-year term from 2004 to 2006 as a member of ASTD’s Board of Directors. He was also elected as the chair of the Executive Committee of the Conference Board’s Council on Learning, Development, and Organizational Performance, and served in that capacity in 2006 and 2007. He serves on Pennsylvania State University’s Outreach Advisory Board. He received his doctoral degree from Temple University in 1976.