Mentorship
To sum it up in someone else's words; long ago, a mentor told me about a quote by Ray Kroc: "When you're green, your growing. When you're ripe, you rot."
This Is Why You Don't Have a Mentor
Finding a mentor doesn't have an endgame. It's an ongoing process that requires checking your ego at the door.
Do you need air to live? I believe the answer is a resounding yes.
Mentorship is Leadership. There are 2 types of leadership; formal and informal. Formal leaders are those that are assigned to a specific position with specific requirements. Informal are those around you that you respect and listen to. Also remember that there are leaders and followers in any given situation...you do not have to always be the leader...nor always the follower. Mentorship can also be showing others how to perform in both roles.
Do you have to follow exactly everything that a mentor says? absolutely not. Use it as a sounding board for ideas, learn new concepts, help you with the sniff test (does it smell like a bad idea?), will they tell you if something is on target or off? Allow you to adjust target?
Right, wrong or indifferent, the POTUS is the highest person in the country for a formal position....do you think that they live in a vacuume and refuse to learn anything? I hope not...they appoint a cabinet of advisors. CEO of a company....similar.... As soon as you no longer need a mentor or refuse to BE a mentor, you may as well crawl up in the graveyard....you are no longer valuable to the bettering of humanity.
To the first question; I would say that there is always an area of someone’s
personal or professional life where they could benefit from mentorship.
For the question of "Should mentorship be mandatory?"
Absolutely not, when something is mandatory, especially something like
mentorship; all inherent benefits of the relationship are essentially stripped
away and it becomes just another futile exercise in "training documented
is training conducted".
In my experience some of the best mentoring takes place without ever
actually being requested or offered. It just happens...
Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying there is no place for official mentoring
but it should be offered as an option and not forced. If you need to force
mentorship, then you're already failing to be a good leader/role model.
One of the best leaders and mentors I know was an ETC (comms) at my first
command over 15 years ago. He provided
some of the best mentorship to me and many others through his actions as a
leader and person. He was never asked to
be an official mentor; he truly just led by example and definitely “practiced
what he preached”. I know that for me
that was a very powerful influence, especially when he stood out from his peers
who typically had a philosophy of “do what I say, not what I do” toward junior personnel. I remember that he would point out uniform discrepancies
of not only junior members but also his peers and senior officers alike, not in
a demeaning or disrespectful manor; but, just to bring it to their attention in
order to correct a mistake or as a learning opportunity.
On a side note before he left the command he did get picked up for LDO.
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