Management styles are revolting …and this revolution is fundamentally altering the culture of management within business. Up to recent times traditional management has been viewed as directive, controlling and authoritative - an “us and them” mentality maintaining the strict boundaries between management and personnel.
This style of management is perfect for those of us who are task orientated rather than people-orientated. Of course we can communicate with staff…we tell them what to DO don’t we…?
In recent times, most companies are faced with the challenge of retaining good staff and creating environments in which they can grow and succeed, there has come a radical revision of how management engages with its human capital - hence the rapid emergence of the modern coach or mentor rather than the traditional manager.
Now leaders must be both managers AND mentors. They must learn not just to communicate but to INVOLVE and ENGAGE with their people, but often there is confusion about the difference in the roles. There’s often confusion for managers about what mentoring is all about, what they are expected to do and how to do it.
Mentoring requires engaging with team members in a different way than traditional management and an enhanced ability to influence and persuade is just one such critical skill. Mentoring is more focused on the transfer of skills or corporate culture to a delegate – or training a person’s thinking about a role or organization.
A mentor also tends to work only with those with whom they have a relationship of seniority, or in contrast with whom they have a higher skill set or more experience in the firm or role.
The function of a mentor, while similar to a coach in terms of developing their professional or performance skills, is limited by the fact that it is primarily about the transfer of those skills unique to a role.
Those skills sets include knowledge of the job, it’s personalities, it’s ethics and all the other absorbed knowledge we take on board when we have worked somewhere for a time. The mentor however, focusing on the ROLE, tends to see the same trees as their mentee but are experienced enough with the territory to find their way out of the wood.
It’s not hard to see how the coaching/mentoring approach gets more motivation and buy-in today than the traditional management approach.
In understanding this difference, a manager, by being trained to manage both his or her communications style and expectations of staff, can move effortlessly between both roles and accomplish even more than was thought possible in the past.
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6 comments:
A good and simple piece for all to understand the critical importance of both Mentoring and Management skills neede to encourage high performance.
Manage and mentoring must work together to get what the traditional management approach CANNOT provide..
Managers is not about telling the team what to do. Managers got to know what to do first before getting people to do because most of the time, the team will refer back to the manager what should they do and what they need to do next.
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a manager in my humble opinion should be a mentor and a person who know what he/she wants and at the same time, give oppurtunities to people below him/her manage to think outside the box and be creative in executing any job given to them.manager will observe and guide.this is where the manager become a mentor...
A great manager should encourage 2 ways of comunication sytle rather than just tell your team what to do. Listen to your team and always encourage them to speak out their ideas.
Be in a high performance organization, we need a good balance of managing and mentoring. I personally felt that is it much easier to manage (because he/she has been given the authority, power and jurisdiction). Believe it or not, most companies do not even bother about mentoring. That is because of the inferiority and fear that kick into their mind… You know what I’m saying?!
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