A Coach and Mentor: Priceless

My first week on the job after graduation I was introduced to one of the older, more senior members on our site. He is a frantic, energetic, big thinking individual who looks like he just walked out of a “look alike” contest for Jim Carrey’s character in “Lemony Snickets”. He sees no boundaries, and “impossible”, “can’t” and “dumb idea” are not in his vocabulary. To marshall all these thoughts and ideas and get them crystallised he has an assistant, who I refer to as his organised half. She ensures everything gets typed up, graphed, scheduled, organised and rolled out. He has a lot of sway and influence over the leadership of our site and is held in very high esteem for his ability to engage with almost any audience and take them on a journey. He fulfils that ideal of making change feel like progress. Unfortunately, for many, he also has a manner in which he will give you one chance, if you blow it you are useless and should be fired.

 Looking like the runner up for the “Lemony Snickets” role, my coach is a frantic bundle of energy and ideas who catalyses change and influences everyone he comes in contact with!

By the end of that first week he had wrangled me into a project before I had even found my desk or logged on to a PC! We delivered results on the project (eventually it got rolled out divisionally as the benchmark), and from then on he became my coach and mentor. We have recently formalised the coaching sessions but even when it was informal I learnt so much from him. He is a guru at change management and organisational development, however, he never sprouts off theories and academic mumbo jumbo. Rather he will discuss real world situations and listen to what my views and experiences are. Throughout these discussions he will listen to the problems, what is going well, the behaviours described and sketch up a little model of the situation. Through this visualisation he leads me to define the way forward for myself. He has not once said “This is what you must do.” This approach is so powerful because it has taught me how to analyse systems and processes comprising technical aspects, people, behaviours and emotions and build little models against which to test things. It’s like a real-world, real-time design of experiments with instant feedback! We often stand in the middle of the corridor “drawing” out flowcharts, models and structures on the walls with our hands and then go out and just try whatever it is we want to try. 

He is also very good at stepping back and letting his students bounce ideas off each other, thereby build a collective understanding and network of coaching. This same sort of model is used very successfully by the Delancey Street Organisation (www.delanceystreetfoundation.org), where residents are made responsible for helping each other develop, battle challenges and overcome their previous failure points. The network that has developed between us students, and the learnings we share, have helped each of us grow into more effective and influential members of our site’s leadership team.

Put in the extra effort and get involved, if lucky you will get a behind the scenes look at how the great minds in your organisation work.

I am in the fortunate position that my mentor bounces new concepts and trials off of me. There is a running joke that I am the guinea pig on which he runs his experiments! I don’t mind at all because I have witnessed first hand how this change management guru thinks and gets things done behind the scenes with seemingly no effort, and I have taken on board these concepts to utilise when the opportunity arises.

Having a coach and mentor is priceless, and being a coach and mentor is a role that I am trying to move into. The benefits go both ways and the entire organisation prospers. So if you don’t have one, do your utmost to try and get the ball rolling. Just like with training, if done whole-heartedly and unselfishly, it is a surefire way to improve yourself, perceptions of you and your network of influence.