Chapter 15: Executive Mentoring

One area in which mentoring has grown very rapidly has been at the very top of organisations. Although a few companies, such as engineers T&N, have experimented with peer mentoring between directors, and others, such as Diageo, have developed a cadre of HR professionals whose main role is to coach and/or mentor the top hundred or so people, most mentoring of executives and directors is carried out by external mentors, who are often professionals in the role.

The Growing Popularity Of Executive Mentoring

So why has executive mentoring suddenly become so popular? Among the stimuli for the executive mentoring movement are (Clutterbuck and Schneider, 1998):

• There has been a gradual repositioning of the nature and role of mentoring at this level. The UK, along with most other Western nations, has a tradition of high-level mentoring with strong sponsorship overtones. As you set your sights on the executive suite, you seek an elder statesperson who can actively steer your progress, find opportunities that will increase your visibility, make introductions and generally be influential on your behalf. Because most people prefer to be seen as having succeeded by their own efforts, it is hardly surprising that they were sometimes reluctant to acknowledge the mentor's role and contribution.

• The rapid spread of developmental mentoring in the past ten years, especially among graduates and minorities, has gradually changed the perception of mentoring in general - at least in the UK and Europe. This is much more in keeping with the image executives are comfortable to project, especially when they are expected to be a role model to others.

• At the same time, there is an increasing acceptance that development is a continuous, career-long activity, even (perhaps especially) at the top. Time pressures make it very difficult for executives to attend business school seminars frequently, and much of the training provided both in such courses and within their organisations is at too low a level to be immediately relevant to their needs. Executives learn most intensively from working on real issues, business or personal, in small groups or one-to-one.

• The nature of executive roles has changed. Senior managers and directors operate in an increasingly complex and stressful environment. Constant organisational change demands constant personal change at the top. For the executive to maintain his or her pace of personal change alongside that of the organisation, he or she needs someone else who can goad, support, ask penetrating questions and be a kind of ‘development conscience'. This is particularly true in smaller businesses, where a major cause of failure is that the business grows faster than the capabilities of the owner-entrepreneur to manage it.

• Organisation structures have also been changing. With flatter hierarchies, the transition from middle to senior manager, or senior manager to director, has become much more of a shock to the system. The learning curve is very steep and anecdotal evidence suggests that, for example, fewer than one in three people who take on the title of director fully absorb the difference in role. Having someone help you through these major transitions is becoming almost a necessity.

Professional mentors help executives get at their own issues, build their own insights and self-awareness, and develop their own, unique ways of handling how they interact with key colleagues and with the business. The professional mentor uses current issues to explore patterns of thinking and behaviour, often starting with the executive's values. He or she asks penetrating questions that stimulate thinking, challenges the executive to take control of issues avoided, helps the executive put his or her own learning in context and raise his or her ability to cope with new issues through greater self-understanding and confidence.

To be effective, professional mentors have to have a broad knowledge and exposure to business direction, to the patterns of senior management thinking and behaviour. They must have a store of relevant business, strategic and behavioural models - and the capacity to generate bespoke models on the spot - which can help executives explore the context of issues under discussion. They need exceptional interpersonal skills of their own, together with a more than passing competence in what can broadly be called counselling skills. Not surprisingly, these are relatively rare creatures.

One reason professional mentoring is so much more demanding - on the executive as well as the mentor - is that it is so holistic. It seeks and deals with issues wherever they are. It requires the mentor to recognise and adapt roles according to the executive's needs at the time. So the mentor may need to be coach, counsellor, sounding-board, critical friend, networker, or any of a number of roles, sometimes within the same two-hour session. This constant reassessing and refocusing is helped by addressing the executive's issues from at least three viewpoints - the values and emotions that drive their behaviour and decision-making, the leader-manager style they adopt, and the needs of the business. Among key questions that emerge frequently are (Clutterbuck and Schneider, 1998):

• How do you think about this issue? (Is your thinking rigorous enough? Adventurous enough?)

• What do you feel about the issue?

• How does this make you behave? (And how consistent is your behaviour?)

• How do you make things happen? (And what do you do when they do not happen?)

• How well do you understand what is really going on in your team? Your business?

• How well do you understand what happens within you? (Do you need to develop greater self-awareness? Can you increase your ‘emotional intelligence'?)

• How could you contribute more (not just in the business, but to your own well-being and that of other people)?