At Strategic Mentoring we can work with the leader, owner, or members of the leadership team to develop their skills as talent developers. Often, entrepreneurs see themselves as the best, if not the only competent thinkers in their organizations. However, we operate on the premise that “no one is as smart as everyone.” The overall thinking capabilities of an organization are enhanced as people are helped to think, contextually, collaboratively, and strategically. Functional managers can produce more and better results as they build the skills of weak or average performers, as they cross-train employees, or as they help employees to anticipate the growing or future needs of the organization. 

Developing people is more than directing them, correcting them, or telling them how to solve their problems. We coach and mentor leaders to hone their skills in this area. We prepare leaders to think about the developmental needs of their people, not just for today’s tasks but for the skills and competencies necessary for future success. 

  • Mentoring High Potential Employees: Organizations win when they maximize the effectiveness of the workers they employ. Most companies have people who are capable of doing more than what is currently being asked of them. People can learn and grow. People bring their natural skills and abilities to work with them and a savvy manager learns how to engage those employees to achieve peak performance. Additionally, what we call “high potential people” are those who clearly bring more talent than we are presently employing. These same people can become restless and look for opportunities elsewhere, when they feel underappreciated or if they become bored by repeating tasks that they’ve already mastered. 

Organizations typically don’t intend to waste that untapped potential. However, many managers feel that they don’t have the time to spend developing the people who work under them. People can become so task saturated that they fail to consider the longer view. Using an outside resource, like us, can bring the time and attention to how the work is being done, and keep help the mentee to extract lessons learned that can be applied in new situations or contexts. When this happens you reap the ROI on the people whom you have brought into your organization; investing time, money, and energy into them in the meantime. 

  • Mentoring Employees with Exceptional Skills: Depending upon the business, some organizations have one or more employees with unusual or exceptional skill sets. These same people can be limited to technical performance within their particular niche. We help organizations learn how to use the overall capabilities of these people for greater results. Mentoring can help these individuals to become better integrated into the strategizing, collaborative thinking, and the team work needed across the organization. Mentoring helps these individuals, and often their managers, to think more broadly about organizational success, in addition to what works from their desk tops on a day-to-day basis. 

Training Your People to Mentor: As organizations become successful, they tend to add people, functions, and/or complexities. Eventually, a leader will need to delegate authority over the workforce to others beside him or herself. Those managers are responsible for developing the talent within their functions, as well as fostering collaboration across boundaries. Does your management team have the skills and wisdom to optimize the outputs of those collaborations? I have seen carefully crafted strategic plans turn to naught because the second tier of managers never succeed, if indeed they even bothered to help their workers understand the implications of that strategy on how work is done on a daily basis, or to see their roles in realizing the gains sought by that strategy. 

We can work with your people to train a small cadre of mentors within your organization.

We can coach and mentor leadership teams to become truly integrated teams focused on a common definition of organizational success.