The Art of Mentoring

I was thrust into leadership positions at a very early age in scouting, first in scouts and then in venture scouts. In both cases I was hopelessly unprepared and absolutely awful. Both my parents were leaders in scouting and I suppose I tried to be the same type of leader as they were, the charismatic type who people followed through force of personality. However, I had no charisma, no idea of what approach to take and was universally detested by the older leaders who, quite rightly, were very annoyed at seeing me make such a mess of it. It was a great relief to me, to them and to the scouts and venture scouts I was nominally in charge of when life sent me in a different direction and ended my connection with scouting for good.

When I became a teacher it was the chance for me to take my own approach to guiding a group of younger people. I stopped trying to lead and started trying to mentor and encourage my students as they made their way in the subjects I taught. When I taught them approaches to Economics or English I did so with the aim of making them less and less reliant on me. Over the past 30 years that seems to have worked at least to some extent and my students, particularly in the EAP field, have gone on to great success which I played a small part in.

I was given the chance to work as a leader in my penultimate full time job. As the Academic Director I combined my mentoring approach with some late developing small scale charisma and had great success I think. Put it this way, the staff and students seemed to appreciate my leadership style. Sadly, that was cut short when the centre was closed, and in my final job it was downhill all the way as my team leader role first diminished and then was removed altogether. It’s frustrating to think both what I could have achieved if my penultimate job had continued and the extent to which my abilities were wasted in my final job.

As with a number of things, I have developed the ability to lead too late. As I got too old to be a good long term option my career wound down to its eventual damp squib of an ending.

What is my advice? Do not follow someone else’s approach to leadership as that never works. Develop your own and stick to it.