Mentoring

When I was first given the assignment to mentor, I looked forward with glee. Maybe when you measure me on technical skills on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 being the worst and 10 being the best, I think I will take the spot of about 6 to 7. If you now place me on the same scale for soft skills, such as leadership. coaching, EQ, etc, at best I will be a 3. Don't take this as me being humble, even though humility is a value that I think we should uphold. I am simply being honest and realistic.

Poor guy, being the chosen one to be my first 'tester', will probably suffer under the rather erratic and unorthodox coaching skills that I am going to apply on him. What to do? With no formal training on mentoring, my unconventional coaching skills will probably be a concoction of the various guidance that I am fortunate to be on the receiving end since the start of career (if you can epithet my job to it).

2 months into this mentoring, the poor guy seemed to have lower and lower enthusiasm and confidence. If this does not mean anything to you, all I can say is maybe you should join me in this acquisition journey of soft skills. His voice became softer. I even detected a slight hint of quivering when he spoke. Notwithstanding my rather retarded sensitivity detector, the alarm within me still went off large and clear. Beep - Bo - Beep - Bo. Have I been too harsh with him?

With the younger generation, they need a different kind of coaching than what we have been bestowed by our seniors previously. They have more fragile self-esteems. They are more idealistic about their career, their ambition and work-life balance. Between the stick and the carrot, the delicate balance is more in favour of the carrot. We are talking about the 'strawberry' generation after all.

The 'throw-into-the-deep-sea-so-that-you-learn-how-to-swim' approach is perhaps too aggressive. The 'you-should-take-initiative-if-I-remain-silent' stance is perhaps too subtle for him to pick up. Maybe the 'strawberry' generation requires more hand-holding. His crushed confidence means that I need reverse the mentoring approach. It is time to introduce more prep talk and more patience - both clearly are not my forte.

Hence, I decided on a heart-to-heart talk with him on some of my working maxims (if I may crown them that). I told him to speak with more confidence. I told him that I espoused independent learning and doing and not spoon-feeding because in work, there was never right or wrong, but different styles. Hence, what worked for me in terms of learning might not work for him. Of course, I could not help but throw in the all-encompassing statement which I was constantly reminded of in my previous job. I told him that being a person placed on fast-track program, he needed to work harder and learned faster than most people. It would be pressurising but the effort put in now would be useful as he progressed in his career. Hence, he needed to learn to prioritise and multitask more than others (one of the reasons for feeling down was because it was quarterly reporting and he had problem juggling normal reporting, shareholders' reporting, business cases and quarterly profit analysis.)

With the prep talk done, I sent him to review the business case again because he had left out some details. Hopefully, I am helping rather than doing him in. My colleagues who overheard the conversation thought I was still not being very harsh. I hope they were right.