The Importance of Mentoring – Part II: Leading to Your Brand
By Ginger Grant
Michelangelo reminds us that the greatest danger for most is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it. Ruts can not only become inhabited, but also fully furnished when we have forgotten (or have been too busy) to pay attention. When was the last time you noticed your cultural aim at work?
This is the importance of Mentors. Mentoring is not about technical competence or establishing a greater skill set. Mentors are all about wisdom—how to function, how to survive and how to thrive. The function of a Mentor is to advise us of our aim, to keep us focused on the target and to communicate the importance of the target (read your mission statement) as it has been established by the partnership.
That target needs to be communicated in such a way to the Mentee that his or her path is directed towards the goal. Each associate may take a different path, as ability, personality and drive differs from person to person. An old story from the famous Mentor of the Grail Legends can help us understand this:
The Knights of the Round Table were a highly select group of individuals that devoted their skills and service to the protection of King Arthur’s Court. The best of the best went in search of the Holy Grail. The advisor to King Arthur, Merlin, was to advise each knight of the Round Table in his search. Such a search was called a Quest, for such an undertaking required a pledge of life-long commitment of service. Merlin studied each knight carefully and his insightful understanding of the knight allowed for the eventual recognition of that knight’s own journey. Each knight contributed special skills to this Quest that were his alone. Therefore, each knight must take a different path to the Grail. Merlin used his skill and wisdom to escort each knight to a different place in the forest to begin the search. In order to find your true path, you cannot follow in another’s footsteps. You must forge your own way to the Grail.
This is part of the difficulty in being a Mentor—you must recognize each individual’s strengths so that you may help that associate find his or her own path.
Is this time-consuming? Yes. There is no magic pill, one-day seminar or book to guide your associates that will cover all possibilities. That is why associate development is so important and must be done on an ongoing basis. The role of a Mentor is critical to the continued success of your firm.
Mentoring is also a critical aspect of the life-map devised by Joseph Campbell, known as the Heroic Journey. No one travels a path totally alone. Allies, or Mentors, may appear at any time and in the strangest of places in order to provide aid to the traveler. Take a moment and think back over your life to this point. Who are your allies? Have you allowed yourself to become isolated from those who could aid your own journey? If you cannot see your own path, how can you guide others?
Try a simple, cost-effective experiment. Ask your associates to find an image that represents the quality of mentoring available in your firm. The image can be a postcard, or scene from a magazine or article, but it must be an image only. Ensure that they provide no language or anything that could identify who chose the image. Have them put the image in a sealed envelope.
Then, have your associate development committee meet and view all of the images. Put them up on a wall or whiteboard. What do you see? Could you use this collection of images as the basis for your advertising? Would you want your client’s to view the images as representational of your firm? Pay attention. Images always speak much louder than words. You are looking at your future.
How To Manage Your Mentee
1. Find out who is behind the lawyer. In order to provide true guidance, you need to know the associate—not the person who applied for the job or the lawyer who shows up to work. Who is the individual? What do they value?
2. How come? One of the most important questions you can ask is “How come?”—NOT “Why?”, which is confrontational. Ask “how come”, to any response you receive to the first point above. It is a gentle method of probing deeper to understand the internal core of your associate, and to get past superficial exterior. Getting to the core of your associates is absolutely essential to effectively brand your organization.
3. Spend time. Impossible you say? If you think that spending time with your Mentee is using up valuable resources, consider how much it costs your firm to replace an associate? Hold your calls, put down your pen or dictation equipment and focus on the associate in front of you. The ritual of time spent varies from location to location. In Vancouver, it usually involves coffee. Whether in your office or outside the firm, understand that the time you spend is not a cost, it is an investment.
4. Allocate a credit of hours spent. Recognition of valuable mentoring skills should be made by your firm in the manner you measure value. If that is a billable code assigned to Mentoring, so be it. The partnership must decide the weight of this type of service to the firm, but it should probably have the same value as a standard billable hour.
Remember to focus on investment, not cost. A good Mentor is worth as much as a Rainmaker. The Rainmaker may bring in the work but the Mentor ensures that associates perform the work to the standard collectively established by the firm. Your Mentor safeguards your reputation and your retention of valuable associates. You need both in order to retain market share.
5. Mentor Manual. I reviewed David Maister’s book, The Trusted Advisor earlier this year. If you need to construct a Manual for Mentors, use Maister’s work as a starting point. You might also want to get a copy of his Practice What you Preach. The title says it all and he provides statistical evidence for why you should.
6. Understand the demographic shift. The old paradigm is dead and has been for a few years now. Command control management does not work. Understand the new paradigm and recognize where your own value system needs to change. For example, pick up a copy of Good to Great by Jim Collins that explores the paradigm shift to a knowledge economy and its financial ramifications to the bottom-line of any organization.
In North America alone over the next 10 years we are looking at a vacancy rate of 34 million jobs. Do the math and proactively plan for your firm to survive. Two of the most important values to the generations that follow the baby boomers are personal and professional development, and work/life balance. The days of demanding 2,500 billable hours a year are long gone. How will your firm make the shift to this new value set? Any action you have taken that requires “buy-in” on the part of your associates is already in trouble. The concept of “buy-in” is part of the old paradigm. Throw it out.
7. Understand the changing role of women. An excellent resource is The 80% Minority by Joanne Thomas Yaccato (Canadian author looking at Canadian demographics). Look at the number of women in your firm and your partnership. Women are no longer a niche in the marketplace. They are the market. Does your firm reflect this market reality? If not, how do you expect to retain market share? If you are not now actively supporting women in your firm, you are rapidly decreasing your market share. If you only have a few token women partners, you are at a severe disadvantage.
8. Do a values inventory. Even if you only conduct this type of exercise with your own Mentee, check out your own values and what they mean—to you and to the associate. You might be surprised to find that the same words have a different meaning. This value gap needs to be eliminated for future success.
If you think you have already established a common value set, think again. Who defined the terms? Remember, you are going for depth in the relationship. List your top ten values. Ask your Mentee to do the same and then discuss what each value means. Analyze terms such as loyalty, work ethic, responsibility, and honesty. Make sure you are speaking the same language. Then each of you should rank your top ten in order of importance. Be prepared for a shock.
9. Ask “‘Who is my Self?’ and ‘What is my Work?’” I mentioned these questions last month in connection with Mentees but they are equally important to a Mentor. What is your legacy? A useful exercise to explore is writing your own obituary. How would others describe your worth? How do you describe your own? Are you on the right path to fulfill your own journey?
10. Walk your talk. The importance of this is self-evident. If you don’t practice what you preach, why should anyone listen to you? Actions always speak louder than words. What actions represent you and your partnership? If you have done the exercise suggested above with the image of a Mentor, you will know the true answer to this question.
How Mentoring Relates to Branding
Mentoring is one of the best investments your organization can make toward future viability. Mentors ensure that your value system is aligned throughout your organization and that this alignment is constantly reinforced, resulting in a truly shared value system. That value system needs to be consistent and understood throughout your organization, including all support staff. At this point, you have something you can brand.
Branding is a marketing term that uses archetypal psychology in linking an image or concept to an organization at an emotional level in the eyes of a client. You can’t brand what my grandmother used to call ‘horse-puckey’. For example, I drive a Volvo because Volvos represent safety. Branding is about clearly recognizable values that actually exist.
Many organizations are attempting to 'brand' their service or product without realizing the importance of internal vision—the story in which the organization resides. Your external brand is your internal value system, your own archetypal code or DNA. If you spend huge quantities of money on external branding without first establishing a solid foundation in your own core values, you are in danger of sounding like a used-car salesman trying to market a car with a faulty engine. In other words, you are selling ‘horse-puckey’.
To use the new science of archetypology as a marketing approach without first understanding how and what archetypal code is within your organization will create a split between 'what you say' and 'what you do'. As such, your firm mission statement becomes empty, meaningless and alienates your associates and your staff.
Aligning your values internally is essential before attempting to brand your firm externally. Anything else is simply changing your letterhead or your logo, as your brand is not supported by an internal value set. You are throwing dollars away that could be put to more effective use in mentoring programs and professional and personal development programs for your staff. Use your marketing budget wisely by starting within, at the core of your organization.
Your Mentors support and strengthen internally what is then presented to your clients externally. What could be more important to the future success of your firm?
About the Author:
Ginger Grant, M.A., is the President of Creativity in Business Canada Inc., a consulting firm that specializes in corporate culture and that was featured in the June/July issue of Scarlett magazine. Ginger can be reached at: ginger@creativityinbusiness.org or 604-924-5360 or through www.creativityinbusiness.org.
Neither the author nor the CBA should be construed as endorsing any product or website listed in this article. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CBA.
In this document, any reference to "jurist" or "lawyer" includes, where appropriate, "Québec notary". |
