Mentoring is crucial, I agree. I also believe it works both ways, that young people can mentor their managers. Another point is that people tend to behave according to the incentive mechanisms they’re offered.
Unless your managers prioritize mentoring, you can’t attract good people. All right, how do you reward your managers for mentoring? Because mentoring takes time. When someone rises to be general manager five or ten years down the line, do you at least thank or congratulate the person(s) who mentored his or her early career? People are easily guided by incentive mechanisms, but many of the mechanisms we use aren’t in line with the world we desire. And that’s what causes the greatest problem. If we adopt the right incentives and make the right choices, then the behavior we want will be disseminated more easily throughout the company. For instance, do we promote managers on the basis of their business performance or their capacity for mentoring? We have to aim for the right balance between the two. Naturally, people who fail at their job can’t be promoted purely on the basis of their great mentoring skills, but does your company give sufficient weight to mentoring in that balance? If you do, that manager type flourishes and attracts more of the same type in turn. But if you insist on assessing managers solely on the basis of their business performance and expect them to mentor in any case, it’s never going to work. Under those circumstances, it’s difficult for managers to allocate resources to mentoring when there’s a squeeze, and that includes time.
So yes, the principles you refer to and the examples you give are truly inspirational. They illustrate critical points in training adults, children, and young people. Unfortunately, I think that our corporate systems fail in this area in that they’re not yet aligned with the world we desire. That’s because the feedback cycles of our incentive mechanisms are generally quite short: one or two years. Yet the feedback cycle of the behavior we aim for could be 10 or 15 years. So how are we going to motivate people to do the right thing during these 10 to 15-year feedback cycles, and how are we going to assess and reward them?
