Worried about your leadership bench strength?

According to Gartner,¹ building leadership bench strength is a major priority in 2019 for 67% of heads of human resources and 78% of talent management leaders globally. Yet most discussions about mentoring centre on the role of mentors in creating great leaders.

If we turn it around, can mentoring mentees develop outstanding leadership skills? The simple answer is: Yes, it can. The reason is, one of the most powerful ways to help a people manager develop leadership capability, is to have them develop and practise mentoring skills. These skills, such as active listening, seeing and amplifying people’s strengths, supporting mentees to grow by challenging them, are the same skills that transformational leaders employ. By contributing as a mentor, new leaders can test and hone their skills with a mentee in a low risk environment, rather than with a direct report.

From good to great leadership

What makes a great leader stand out from a satisfactory one? Bass & Avolio say truly transformational leadership provides direct reports with the values, enhanced skills, and confidence to go above and beyond the basic performance standards of their roles.² It’s also about having a strong understanding of human motivation to know how to light a fire within team members. And this process starts with communicating a vision that inspires team members to go the extra mile.³ Great leaders also link their team member’s individual strengths and interests to organisational goals, creating a continuum of energy.⁴

The list of traits of transformational leaders is, frankly, quite long:

They build trust by behaving as outstanding role models.
They develop their team by looking at each member as an individual.
They stimulate their team members’ critical thinking capacities to increase their independence.
And they draw on their own experience to share stories of how they overcame difficulties in similar situations.⁵

Transactional leaders, on the other hand, pursue a more elementary exchange with their direct report. These leaders set goals mechanically and provide feedback and rewards to followers as a means of helping them achieve performance objectives. This approach doesn’t transform or challenge the follower, but simply assists them to complete their work.

This comparison of transformational with transactional leadership correlates quite neatly with developmental vs transactional mentoring. When a mentor can lift the conversation above a simple transfer or exchange of information or advice, true mentee development and transformation can occur.

Pursuing the mentee’s own form of greatness

Ragins⁶ says a successful mentoring relationship drives mutually dependent, growth-driven enrichment between both the mentor and the mentee. In fact, the greatest contribution a mentor can make is to ensure mentees identify and pursue their own form of greatness, not necessarily the mentor’s.

Quality developmental relationships can ignite a passion for learning, excitement, and work engagement associated with creativity, innovation, and productivity. Individuals who display these mentoring and leadership behaviours harness the full potential of their protégés, and direct it towards achieving their organisation’s goals.

Many studies have focused on enhanced organisational outcomes associated with strong leadership. From innovation to retention, to financial performance, market share and customer satisfaction and transformational leadership—it’s clear, mentoring can ignite organisational performance.⁷

The seven ages of the leader

Warren Bennis wrote an engaging article on the subject of business and leadership. Drawing on more than 50 years of academic research and business expertise—and borrowing from Shakespeare’s seven ages of man—Bennis says the leader’s life unfolds in seven stages.

“The infant executive” seeks to recruit a mentor for guidance.
“The schoolboy” must learn how to do the job in public, subjected to unsettling scrutiny of every word and act.
“The lover with a woeful ballad” struggles with the tsunami of problems every organisation encounters.
“The bearded soldier” must be willing—even eager—to hire people better than he is, because he knows that talented underlings can help him shine.
“The general” must become adept at not simply allowing people to speak the truth but at actually being able to hear what they’re saying.
“The statesman” is hard at work preparing to pass on wisdom in the interests of the organisation.
And, finally, “the sage” embraces the role of mentor to young executives.

Navigating each of these stages is made easier with the guidance of a mentor. Each new stage brings challenges and opportunities for growth. These moments can be wrenching—and can knock anyone’s confidence—but they’re also predictable and part of the leadership experience. Having a mentor at these moments of crisis and transitions can help new leaders know what to expect. Emerging successfully from a tsunami such as a merger, a restructure or new promotion can help mentees surface with less angst and more confidence than they had before.

Yet, even more powerful, is asking leaders or potential leaders to step up into the role of mentorship—level seven—thereby accelerating their progress through the levels, to become “the sage” who helps others develop their own wisdom.

Creating better leaders from the inside out

So, how can we improve the leadership skills of organisational leaders? The answer is to make them better mentors.

Business coaches suggest leadership is not a top-down relationship, but one that’s drawn from the inside out. The leader as mentor draws on their entire memory of experiences to listen and understand their mentee, and inspire them in the discovery and expression of their own talents within the organisation.⁸

This correlates with the metaphor of the martial arts master borrowed from the Asian Ancients:

To start at the core of essence and dance with the learner as that learner works toward the periphery of discovery on a path of self-direction.⁹

As the mentor understands themselves and their strengths better, they’re able to see their mentee more clearly, and skilfully support them in pursuing their own areas of growth. They will then take this self-awareness back with them into their team leadership.

There we have it in a nutshell. When you’re building your leadership bench strength, make your next generation of leaders, mentors. Provide them with good quality mentor training to equip them with skills such as active listening, seeing people as individuals and supporting their followers to grow by challenging them. The aim of the mentoring relationship for new leaders is to learn a more informal, subtle, and indirect influence process that enhances their self-awareness and communication skills. Becoming a truly transformational leader will in turn, achieve great things for your organisation.

¹ https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/how-to-build-leadership-bench-strength/

² Bass, B. M., & Avolio, B. J. (1997). Full range leadership development: Manual for the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire. Palo Alto, CA: Mind Garden.

³ Bass, B. M. (1990). Bass and Stodgill’s handbook of leadership. New York: Free Press.

⁴ Hambrick, D. C. (1989). Putting top managers back in the strategy picture. Strategic Management Journal, 10, 5–15.

⁵ Sosik, J. J., & Godshalk, V. M. (2000). Leadership styles, mentoring functions received, and job-related stress: A conceptual model and preliminary study. Journal of Organizational

Worried about your leadership bench strength?