Jun 29, 2020 | Collaboration, Governance, Leadership
I was recently asked to turn my mind and experience to the question of mentoring, and to reflect on the benefits and pitfalls that may be present.
Over the years, I have had the benefit of a couple of mentors who profoundly influenced my view of the world, and in turn, have set out to pass on these lessons to others.
At the core of a mentoring relationship is the opportunity to engage in ways not easily replicated in the normal run of activities in an enterprise. Attributed to Benjamin Franklin is the sentence: ‘Tell me and I will forget, show me and I will remember, engage me and I will learn’. Over 45 years of commercial life, this simple observation has proven to be absolutely true.
The means of engagement comes from Greek philosopher Socrates, and as a result is commonly called the ‘Socratic Method’. It relies on leading someone to a conclusion by asking questions. By driving towards a conclusion that the mentee reaches by themselves, being directed by questions, the impact will be greater, as they will be fully engaged.
Objective of a mentor/mentee relationship.
To pass on experience, both professional and life, that enables the mentee to develop their capabilities and skills faster than would otherwise have been possible.
The role of a mentor is:
- Develop the mentee professionally and personally. To achieve this requires mutual trust and respect, which has to be earned, as it will not be just given, in either direction.
- A precursor of trust is that there is a clear understanding that mutual confidentiality will be maintained.
- Listen to the words, and understand the meaning of the words of the mentee, as a means to ensure there is clear understanding of the questions, problems, and personal nuances present.
- Help the mentee to solve their own problems themselves, do not do it for them, but assist in the process by questioning.
- Not to expect, or want the mentee to be a clone of yourself. Everyone is different, and those differences of experience and perspective should be encouraged and leveraged.
- Advocate for the mentee, offering exposure and guidance to others in the enterprise, and to the challenges that emerge in every organisation and personal career.
- Deliver appropriate resources to the mentee when they will be most useful
- Act as a role model
The process of mentoring
- Establish ground rules, goals, and mutual expectations early on.
- Do a ‘needs’ assessment and gap analysis, that recognises the strengths and weaknesses of the mentee, as well as their opportunities for growth. The gap analysis should be influenced by the next logical step, mentee aspirations, and observed/agreed weaknesses that require being addressed.
- Agree mutual goals for the process, together. What are the expectations and goals of both parties?
- Agree a formal contact schedule, supplemented by the ‘rules’ that may apply around informal contact.
- Listen and question, rather than advising, and only advise after listening. This should be an iterative process, and advice should be the last item, well after questions that are often ‘What if’, ‘Why not’, or ‘How’, have been exhausted
- Let them make their own decisions and understand the consequences of accountability, and the buzz that comes from it.
- Be mutually accountable
- Recognise, address and be transparent about your own biases.
- Build trust, an authentic connection.
- Recognise a round peg that may be in a square hole, and provide feedback and assistance to either reshape or move elsewhere, to everyone’s benefit.
- Finally, and perhaps most importantly. Ensure there is a sense of psychological safety for the mentee, such that they are prepared to open up, knowing that there are no negative repercussions, just advice and acceptance. This will only happen over time, and assumes that the relationship has evolved positively.
- Not every mentor/mentee relationship will work, and there should be no hesitation for either party to acknowledge that, and move on.
Why invest the time in mentoring
- Every enterprise needs to build a functional and leadership ‘bench’. People move on, and around. A successful enterprise ensures that there are processes in place to renew management and leadership capability that are robust and continuously improving, so that they can accommodate those movements of individuals.
- It is a means to identify and develop those skills that will be of benefit to both the enterprise and the individual.
- Mentoring is a powerful way to build personal and functional networks. This enables problem solving and collaboration on a scale much wider than would happen in the absence of a mentoring process.
- Teaching, or mentoring, is the process of breaking down and addressing challenges and problems, considering options, and their possible outcomes. Engaging in such a process improves the capability of the mentor, as much as it does that of the mentee.
- It is simply making a contribution, not only to the mentee, but to the organisation and wider community.
What makes a good mentor?
- They need to be keen to do it, and enjoy the process
- They must engage with the mentee, and show they value learning, and teaching, and learning as they go from the act of teaching.
- They will encourage mentees to go out of their comfort zone, continually expanding it by way of active listening and Socratic questioning.
- They provide regular, formal and informal feedback, and articulate the paths to improvement.
- They are experts, and willing to share that expertise.
- They show the mentee the value of being mentored, what is in it for them.
- Leads by example.
- Recognises that the process is one of education, not training. Educating implies developing an open and critical analysis of situations, and formulation of tactics that reflect that situation. By contrast, training implies the application of a template that tells you what to do, which may not always be the optimum reaction. The ‘Why’ is always more important than the ‘What’ in a conversation.
What makes a good mentee?
- Watches and learns from the mentor
- Critically evaluate the lessons taken from the mentor and actively discuss the implications and application of the lessons.
- Willing and able to engage in the process
- Puts a high priority on the relationship with the mentor, without becoming dependent
- Actively engages in mutual critical thinking in the setting of goals, improvement initiatives, and improvement milestones.
- Is able to accept negative feedback when it comes, by seeing it as an opportunity to improve, rather than an attack on performance.
A final observation. In this day of #metoo and great sensitivity about the relationships of all types between genders in the workplace, we have to be absolutely transparent. The majority of mentoring relationships, at least in the near future, will be between a woman and an older man, someone who has the power by virtue of position and influence that can be leveraged for the benefit of the younger woman. In some instances this may create an obstacle absent in a mono gender relationship.
Jun 25, 2020 | Branding, Communication, Customers
Kids understand stories, it is the way they learn, the way they absorb the lessons of the past for later use.
Why don’t we use this instinctive capability more often in our marketing?
Take your kids to the pantomime, they love it.
They get excited every time the villain comes on stage. They boo, yell warnings to the hero, and hop up and down in frustration when the hero looks around as the villain hides.
Why does this matter?
When building a brand, you have to make choices. Who is your brand for, and just as importantly, who is it not for?
If you can explicitly state who your brand is not for, then those for whom it is for, will rally around and support it against the villain.
Simple stuff, hidden in the instinctive responses in our brains.
Watch your kids at the panto, and learn how to build a brand.
Define the villain, and the kids will cheer for you.
Jun 22, 2020 | Analytics, Customers, Marketing
One of the questions occupying my newly monastic mind over the past few weeks has been: ‘what changes can we expect in the revenue generation processes as a result of the ‘Bug?’.
In the lead up to this crisis, I have been considering how automated everything was becoming, at the expense of humanity.
There is an inherent conflict between the centralising force that is the ‘Martech’ (marketing technology) automated decision making processes, and the front line sales function. Martech investment requires that a range of decisions to buy and install various combinations of software be made that automates a selling relationship. The decentralised nature of the sales front line does not benefit from such automation, as people still prefer to buy from people, particularly in cases where the investment is large, or there is an emotional element to the purchase.
To my mind, it has become too clinical and automated in most large businesses. This creates opportunities for smaller businesses whose niche is perhaps more clearly defined, and who lack the resources and capability to leverage an integrated ‘Martech stack’.
The Bug has brought the question to the fore.
On one hand, we are now compelled by circumstances to interact using the digital tools, but there is a steep learning curve for many, and SME’s are rapidly discovering their capability shortcomings. On the other, human contact will become more valuable than ever, and those same SME’s may be in a better position than most large companies to be ‘Human’.
Where on the scale does your business fit?
Jun 19, 2020 | Marketing, Strategy
‘The bug’ has given us a once in a generation opportunity to make change. Things that may not have been possible, have suddenly become not just possible, but necessary.
While most of the focus is automatically on cutting costs, the greater long term benefit is in the optimising of current expenditure. Arbitrarily cutting costs, as often happens in extreme circumstances, always results in throwing out a few babies with the bathwater.
Revenue generation, the combination of sales and marketing budgets, is usually the first to feel the knife when times get tough.
However rather than just ‘cutting’ across the board, or making the obvious decisions by cutting the biggest items first, consider the opportunity to optimise, and how this will deliver cost savings. More importantly, such an exercise can increase the productivity and long term impact of the investments you make, as well as reducing costs.
Classifying all expenditure into ‘buckets’ so that you can then allocate a weight to their relative value, and concentrate on those from which you can extract productivity increases, is a sensible first step.
All expenses can be classified in two major axes:
- Fixed to variable or discretionary expenses. Those that are not able to be reduced or improved, to the extreme of expenses which are entirely discretionary, such as media spend.
- The second axis is tactical to strategic. The short term expenditure which can reasonably be expected to deliver a return in a very short term, to the other end of the scale, the strategic expenditures which are normally those that appear to be in the ‘important but not urgent’ pile.
The manner in which you go about optimising your expenditure will be a function of your competitive context, the financial and strategic position you are in, and the strategic priorities in place. It will also reflect the attitude of the person delivering the instructions. Therefore, it is also a measure of your effectiveness at arguing the role that investment in marketing has to the health of the enterprise.
Your fixed marketing costs are items like employee costs, marketing software licences, retainers paid to service providers, and are often overlooked, or just cut arbitrarily. In the absence of a critical review, mistakes will be made.
Discretionary costs are often heavily weighted towards media, and they are very easy to cut. This will deliver a short term cost saving while often compromising the commercial sustainability of the enterprise.
History shows us that those who continue investing thoughtfully in the tough times, benefit hugely as the better times return.
When instructed to cut costs, do so with an intensive focus on the relative revenue and margin generating productivity of the cost you are about to cut, and to the long term impact that will have on the enterprise.
Jun 17, 2020 | Analytics, Change
To measure anything in a meaningful way, you need some sort of baseline.
To say you have a 20% increase in market share sounds impressive, but if your starting point is a 5% share, it is less so. By contrast, if your starting point is 40% in a competitive market, a 20% increase is a great effort.
Setting this baseline from which to measure change can be extremely difficult. Finding a simple measure that captures the impact of a wide range of variables while adequately reflecting the whole story is never as easy as it sounds.
Look at Australia’s published rate of unemployment. Whatever it is on any given date, it is an extrapolated survey that includes a definition of ’employment’ as: 1 hour of paid work a week. Clearly nonsense, but what is the real measure? How do you gather reliable data that offers actionable insights into segments of the population which are subject to a myriad of differing drivers?
Climate scientists faced this problem when setting out to determine the rate at which the decay of vegetable matter, which emits CO2 during the decomposition process, was adding to the store of CO2 in the atmosphere.
This is an enormously complex problem, driven by variations in temperature, humidity, type of vegetation, and the state of vegetation, particularly as it relates to permafrost slowly becoming less permanent.
The measurement solution came to two scientists as they struggled to assemble reliable data from the varied sources, collected in varied ways, around the world. They buried two teabags in the same location. One which decayed quickly at first, then much more slowly, and the other that decayed in the opposite manner.
By establishing the quantitative impact of differing conditions on the two teabags, a reliable measure of the rate of decomposition can be calculated. That calculation holds irrespective of the location, establishing a baseline from which the amount of CO2 being emitted by decaying vegetable matter from that location, can be derived.
Subsequently, they have engaged with interested people around the world using the same two teabag types. By pooling data, they had arrived at a means to calculate with considerable accuracy, how much CO2 was being emitted by the process of decomposition of vegetation globally.
They had The Teabag Index.
Economists use a similar measure of purchasing power of currencies across the world, by converting the local price of a Big Mac into US dollars. This is pretty obviously called the Big Mac Index, and has proved to be a pretty reliable indicator for over 30 years.
Sometimes the best solutions to complex problems lie in being creative about finding a simple solution. This is rarely obvious, but sometimes hiding in plain sight.
What is your teabag index?
It will be those few simple numbers that are a reliable macro indicator of the performance of your business.
