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6.Provide employees with a choice of assignments.

7.Send your employee to a seminar on a new topic.

8.Take an employee along with you when you call on customers.

9.Introduce your employee to top managers in your organization, and arrange to have him or her perform special assignments for them.

10.Allow an employee to shadow you during your workday.

HOW TO BE A MENTOR

Most business leaders are familiar with the power of mentoring, a relationship in which a person with greater experience and wisdom guides another to a higher level of personal and professional excellence. In fact, the vast majority of business executives have experienced successful mentoring relationships first hand. In a recent survey of Fortune 1000 executives sponsored by Robert Half International, 94 percent of respondents stated that having a mentor is important for individuals early in their careers and 75 percent reported that they currently have a mentor or have had one in the past.

While formal mentoring programs in business are a relatively recent phenomenon, James Cash Penney in 1901 was an early proponent of formal mentoring as a way of developing managers to build new J.C. Penney stores. The history of mentoring is very long and very rich. The term mentor comes from the ancient Greek myth of Odysseus. According to legend, when King Odysseus prepared to leave home on a tenyear journey to fight in the Trojan War, he asked his loyal friend Mentor to protect, guide, and teach his young and inexperienced son Telemachus. Mentor—actually, the goddess Athena in disguise—gladly did Odysseus’s bidding, guiding Telemachus’s development, becoming his trusted advisor, and teaching him important lessons about life.

In business today, mentoring most typically refers to the pairing up of an older, more experienced employee—often a manager—with a younger, less experienced employee. Researchers point to numerous

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T H E R E A L W O R L D

We all need heroes and role models in our lives, and this is all the more true when it comes to our careers. Most people will spend more time planning their next vacation than they will ever give to planning their career. Having a mentor helps to give you a per- spective—and needed feedback—on your job, career, and profession. Chances are, however, getting a mentor will not happen by accident! You need to think about whom you can best learn from and approach him or her about the opportunity. Perhaps initially, meet the potential mentor for lunch and ask for advice about an issue in your job. If the individual is helpful and supportive, you can expand the types of things that you ask for advice about, and, at some point, ask if he or she would be interested in being an ongoing advisor for you. Most people are honored to be asked to be an ongoing advisor for someone’s career.

benefits of mentoring relationships for both mentor and protégé, and to the organizations for which they work. In one study, executives who had a mentor earned higher incomes at an earlier age than executives who did not have a mentor. In another study, protégés reported a greater commitment toward their organizations, higher job satisfaction, better socialization, a greater sense of career progress, and higher salaries and promotions as a result of their mentoring experiences.

There are two main types of mentoring programs in common use today: formal and informal. Formal programs create prescribed processes for identifying prospective mentors and protégés and then pairing them up. Informal programs have no prescribed pairing processes, instead relying on mentors and protégés to self select. While both kinds of mentoring programs are commonly used, it is increasingly clear from both the research and the practical application of mentoring programs in a wide variety of organizational settings that formal

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mentoring programs are more successful, producing more and better quality mentor-protégé relationships.

Mentors benefit organizations—and the employees within them— in a variety of different ways, including:

•Explaining how the organization really works. Experienced employees know how their organizations really work—both in their formal and in their informal procedures, processes, and cultures. A mentor will have a very good understanding of what the company’s formal pronouncements really mean, and he or she can convey that knowledge to other, less experienced, employees without their having to figure it out the hard way.

•Teaching by example. Effective mentors know the best ways to get things done in organizations, and they can teach other employees these same lessons. There’s no reason every employee should have to figure out how to get things done by themselves when there are experienced employees around who can show them the ropes.

•Providing growth experiences. Mentors are highly qualified to guide employees to activities above and beyond their formal career development plans that will be helpful to their career growth and progress. So, while an employee’s career development plan might be silent in the area of learning how to speak Spanish, a mentor might understand that making the suggestion that an employee attend community college Spanish classes would be of great benefit to him due to changing customer demographics.

•Providing career guidance and discussion. Above all, mentors make great sounding boards, and they are usually a safe place for employees to be frank and honest with assessments of their own progress and how they fit within their organizations. The informal discussions that mentors and employees engage in are extremely valuable to the employees, and—ultimately—to the companies for which they work.

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P O P Q U I Z !

A great manager will almost always be skilled at developing and mentoring employees. Reflect on the contents of this chapter in answering these questions:

1.What are benefits to developing your employees?

2.How can you better help your employees to learn and grow?

3.Name three specific actions you can use to give an employee increased responsibility.

4.Have you ever had a mentor in your work life or career? If so, what did you most value and learn from that person?

5.What are ways you can help mentor other employees in your organization?

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IIIP A R T

Execution: Getting

the Job Done

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C H A P T E R 7

V

Setting Goals

IT’S A NEW WORLD OUT THERE . . .

Setting Goals and . . .

The purpose of goals.

SMART goals made easy.

Communicating goals and vision.

Maintaining focus on your goals.

Making goals happen.

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GOALS MAKE THINGS HAPPEN

“All performance starts with clear goals” is one of the most time-tested principles of management. What is the primary duty of management? Setting goals is likely to be near the top of the list. If setting goals appears near the bottom of the list, you know there’s a problem. In most companies, top management sets the overall purpose—the vision—of the organization. Middle managers then have the job of developing goals and plans for achieving the vision set by top management. Managers and employees work together to set goals and develop schedules for attaining them.

Managers are immersed in goals—not only for themselves but also for their employees, your department, and your organization. This flood of goals can overwhelm managers as they gallantly try to balance their relative importance. Goals help provide your employees with direction and purpose; they help them see where they’re going and how they can get there. And the way you go about setting goals can impact how motivating (or demotivating) they are to your employees.

If you want to get somewhere meaningful in your business, you and your employees first have to know where to go. And once you’ve decided where to go, the next step is to make plans on how to get there.

Let’s say you have a vision of starting up a new technology incubator in Toronto, Ontario. If you want to achieve this vision, you have three basic approaches:

1.An unplanned, non-goal-oriented approach.

2.A planned, goal-oriented approach.

3.A hope and a prayer.

Which of these three approaches is the most likely to help you achieve your goal (or at least move in the right direction)? A planned,

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