EQ and Leadership

For years I worked with an organization that was run by a CEO who, if I was to score him, was off the charts in terms of his EQ. He had an uncanny ability to win you over to his side of an argument or philosophy, not due to his being in charge of the organization, but due rather to his being persuasive, your immediately best friend, your teacher, and your buddy in the fox-hole. After meetings with him not only were you persuaded by his arguments, but you had adopted his arguments as moral standards of your own and were ready to take on the world to make them a reality. Thankfully for my career, I was in a position to be mentored by him and my career took off by working for him and following his coattails.

One of the benefits of having a leader like this was that his attitude pervaded the organization and everyone beneath him worked hard to mentor and convince and support one another in a similar way. During those years, other than that CEO, I had two or three other mentors who I could turn to at any given time to ask for advice, to turn to for guidance, and to mimic and model my work life after. I didn't know until now how special that was.

I work now for a much smaller organization that has lacked for many years the type of guidance leadership and presence that we found so easily at my previous organization. That is starting to change, and mentorship, advocating and supporting the ones you lead, and guidance is becoming a normal thing, and in part, I was brought in to help the COO make these changes in the organization, but I'm stunned by how such a small organization that helps create a "learning community" could miss out on such a critical piece in career and workforce development. The organization also at the moment suffers from a lack of quality mid-level managers, but we are working to change all of that.

"Traditional mentoring has the connotation of a senior person assisting a younger person's career development and acculturation to the organization through counseling, advice, and feedback." This is a quote from our reading this week A Conceptual Framework for Mentoring in a Learning Organization, by Carolyn M. Klinge, PhD. I found several passages quite worthwhile and immediately shared the article with several colleagues. Another that his me was, "According to Mezirow, transformative learning is central to adult education. Grounded in the nature of human communication as seeking meaning, transformative learning derives meaning from experience, providing the basis for action. Learners engage in deep conversation or discourse, described as "a special kind of dialogue" focused on "content and an attempt to justify beliefs by giving and defending reasons and by examining the evidence for an against competing views."

The other day I was talking to one of my direct reports about this very thing, that so often the connections that we form with others are more important than the day to day work that we might do. I have to force myself to stop doing daily chores and go check on my direct reports and be sure they are being mentored in a meaningful way. I have to remind myself how important taking one of my direct reports out for a lunch might be, not for the decisions we might make while we do so, but for the time to gain trust, let loose those snippets of wisdom that might not come with the daily ebb and flow of work life. Often I have to channel those moments from my old organization when that CEO I respected so much took time out of his life to have a long talk with me or to discuss some feature of work and life. As I may have mentioned previously I did not score high on the TPI for nurturing, so it does not come naturally to me. I find that I must confront myself and my natural reactions and make myself go slow down and help mentor those that might need that help.

• Have any of you had a situation similar to this? Where you've come to an organization that had little to no mentorship activities going on naturally?
• What were some of the things you did to help encourage it? How can I best change that culture to become one that supports this type of leadership?

While at my previous, mentor rich, organization, I had the change to mentor only one, perhaps two direct reports at any one time. Now, I have six or seven who need my attention. I find it interesting that a learning organization like the one I've come into does not have a stronger mentorship and nurturing culture.