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Team Leadership:

Mentoring that Builds Leadership part 1 of 2

Three experiences from which people learn to lead are:*
- Trial and error
- Observation of others
- Education

"Without guidance from a mentor, most emerging leaders go through their development processes lacking the wisdom they need to learn readily and effectively."

This article was authored by John Hawkins, Founder and President of Leadership Edge Incorporated. Mr. Hawkins helps university students and organizational leaders across America wrestle with the issue of developing a leadership lifestyle. He believes that this is essential for effective, long-term leadership of today’s chaotic organizations and corporations. Mr. Hawkins is an author, consultant, speaker, husband, and father.

Great leadership requires great influence. Great leaders are not born with a genetic code that dictates great leadership, nor are they self-made into great leaders. A study of any honorable effective leader will show that along the way of their development, they received many infusions of substantive influence from relationships and events that they experienced. Emerging leaders use great influence to help them become great leaders.

At a time when Americans have compelling reasons for concern about the current and future leadership of our country, one must consider the necessity of becoming a source of great influence. There is more to be done than sitting, listening to "talk radio" and picking our current leaders apart. Our children, college students and young employees are in their developmental years for becoming leaders in their future marriages, families, careers and communities. Ours is a context for proactive influence, not reactive cynicism.

But where does one begin? Great influence that builds great leadership is a mentoring process. Mentoring that builds leadership must be based upon an understanding of how leadership development takes place. As one understands how leaders develop, then one can understand how they can support and encourage this process.

In their practical, research-based book The Leadership Challenge, authors James Kouzes and Barry Posner describe the practices and commitments of effective leaders. The book’s last chapter, "Becoming a Positive Force," gives direction to the development of effective leadership. The authors state that from their studies of thousands of leaders, they have gleaned three experiences from which people learn to lead. These three, listed in order of importance, are:*
• Trial and Error
• Observation of Others
• Education

Kouzes and Posner indicate that the importance of these three leadership development experiences is confirmed by similar studies done by the Center for Creative Leadership and by the Honeywell Corporation.

These three leadership learning experiences suggest three services that mentors can provide for the development of emerging leaders. These three mentoring services are:
• Guidance
• Facilitation
• Input

By providing these for their proteges, mentors can speed up the proteges’ leadership development process and help insure the quality of their development. Just as a catalyst in a chemical reaction causes the reaction to take place more quickly and effectively, so a mentor has the potential to cause the same effect in their protege’s leadership development process.

Guidance
As leaders-in-the-making experience trial and error, observation of others and educational opportunities, they have great need for various forms of guidance. At times, they need guidance that gives direction through the maze of leadership decisions and challenges. At other times when the leadership context seems fast-paced, chaotic, and ethically challenging, the protege needs guidance on the meaning of principled leadership that is both effective and ethically balanced.

At regular intervals, developing leaders need guidance that fosters courage for decisive action and moral integrity. In this way, they need mentors whose words and actions model the way for courageous steps forward. Finally proteges need feedback that guides them as they apply the lessons learned from their trial and error, observation of others and educational opportunities.

Without guidance from a mentor, most emerging leaders go through their development processes lacking the wisdom they need to learn readily and effectively. They tend to need longer exposure to trial and error, observation of others and educational opportunities to learn the same lessons that those with mentors learn in a shorter amount of time. Without the catalytic guidance of a mentor, the leadership development process takes more time to produce the same result.

* The Leadership Challenge, James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner, Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1995, page 325.

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© Copyright – John Hawkins – May 1999 - Used with permission