Mentors

Paul Richardson October 2011

Andy Grove (Intel founder) has an article in Bloomberg Business Week; September 26 October 2, 2011. Its title is Be a Mentor. In the article he draws a sharp comparison between the Human Resource Department programs with their complex and counterproductive routines and real mentoring in the words best sense. He claims that the moment someone says mentor or mentee that he gets waves of nausea. He describes the problem as My problem is this: As a manager you are supposed to be a resource. The principal job of somebody in management is to be a resource to the people who work for you. That means setting direction for them. It means kicking their asses if they lag. But the most important thing is to teach them how to deal with increasingly complex assignments, by letting them do the work and watching them. There is also role-modeling, critiquing, and on and on, all ending in -ing. All that is teaching. Some stuff in companies can be made routine and machine-like. But teaching? You routinize it you screw it up. He describes a job they had at Intel called technical assistant or TAs who would work with senior executives. He said he selected his TAs to be able to teach him something about an area he didnt know. He said what they got from him was seasoning. He said he pushed and beat them mercilessly (verbally not physically). He said the process wasnt to teach

them their job but what he called manners, that is, how to handle hurdles, explosions, any old mess. Have you noticed the remarkable similarity to the way Steve Jobs managed at Apple? Very high expectations and help in the way of verbal, pointed critiques of the job being done. Was Jobs executing a human resources department process? Hardly. He was developing people to be their best which in the end is the managers prime function. The Jobs/Grove management technique stands in sharp contrast to the open-loop and go-along, get-along process used in so many organizations. The Jobs/Grove style is toxic ground for political correctness and group think but the open-loop process is the most fertile of ground for those performance decimating problems. Bossidy and Charan in Execution The discipline of getting things done point out that performance organizations must not only allow but encourage robust dialog. Robust dialog is basically arguing passionately about some issue the organization is featuring. The point is to get to a common understanding of the truth, not to hurt anyones feelings. In truth, once employees experience the process they begin to realize that they will win some arguments and lose some but that the organization has a more robust understanding of the issues involved and a much higher likelihood of a positive outcome for the decision being discussed. This leads to increased mental toughness and far less crybaby wusses. Most importantly it results in far better organizational performance.