- Respond; Don’t React
- Tribe of Mentors
- Have a Plan; Be Flexible
- Bike of Life; Seek Balance;
- Sweat the Small Stuff
- Know Yourself
- Know Others
- Invest in Yourself; Be the Best
- Leave Space for Others
- Lead from the Back
- Modularise
This is a collection of lessons related to my own mentoring journey that I have collected over the years. I hope you find them useful.
1. Respond; Don’t React
This is my operating rule number 1. And sometimes its really hard to do implement.
The general idea is that immediate reactions can make a situation worse. We should engage our OODA loop to generate a reasoned response. And remember, sometimes doing nothing is the best response!
https://www.fastjetperformance.com/blog/why-fighter-pilots-know-that-quick-reactions-are-for-losers
2. Tribe of Mentors
Don’t have just one mentor, have a tribe. A tribe or community of mentors is the group of people you can call upon at various times to help guide your journey.
Each individual in my mentor tribe has a specific skill or characteristic that I admire and would like to replicate. The composite of these people is who I would like to become. This vision of my future self is one of the key things that keeps me motivated to learn and improve myself.
Book and Podcast: Tribe of Mentors by Tim Ferris https://tribeofmentors.com/
3. Have a Plan, but be Flexible
You know the cliché – no plan survives first contact with the enemy. . Having a plan is important, but having the ability to adapt as the situation changes is key. This means that your plans should have decision points, off-ramps, and fail-safe features built-in.
Google: “Flexibility is the key to airpower” and you’ll find lots of articles related to this principle.
4. Bike of Life; Seek Balance
I’ve found this metaphor useful for balancing work and family commitments.
Imagine your life as a bicycle. Each wheel makes up your work and home life. The spokes on each wheel are the key pillars of those lives. The key message is to make sure your bike is balanced by placing sufficient emphasis on each pillar (spoke) and therefore achieve balance.
5. Sweat the Small Stuff
There’s lots of advice out there saying “don’t sweat the small stuff; it will look after itself”.
My experience is quite the opposite. The people getting ahead are those who are paying attention to the important details. The people who don’t know the details, or gloss over them, are quickly found out as being ineffective leaders.
Knowing which details are important is a skill in itself – see 8. Invest in Yourself.
6. Know Yourself
Are you in it for the journey or the destination? What are your core motivations and beliefs? How do you make decisions?
These are the kinds of questions you should be able to readily answer.
When opportunity comes knocking, knowing these things about yourself will help you decide if it is something that you want to pursue (i.e. it is aligned with your beliefs, motivations, and goals), or you can safely let it go.
Some career mentors would tell you to bite off every opportunity and work like buggery to pull off as much as you can. That’s fine if those opportunities are aligned with where you want to go, but more often than not I’ve found that they just become distractions, and detract from your ability to focus on your real goals.
Book: Redefining Airmanship by Tony Kern https://www.amazon.com.au/Redefining-Airmanship-Tony-T-Kern/dp/0070342849
7. Know Others
What makes people tick? What are their motivations?
I’ve found this is key to understanding where people are coming from and how best to communicate with them.
I’ve had countless moments getting frustrated, and thinking to myself that I don’t understand why a certain decision was made, or course of action taken. I would later find out some new information which put that in context, and then the decision made sense. I didn’t have to agree with it, but at least I understood it and could reason with it.
The message here is: take the time to understand the people you are working with: What is their background? What are their motivations? How are they incentivised to perform? This information will help you find the angle and have greater influence.
Book: The Myth of Nine to Five: Work, Workplaces and Workplace Relationships by Ted Scott and Phil Harker
8. Invest in Yourself
This one is about making sure you focus on continuing to develop your own personal specialisation. Something you can do that no one else can. It is one thing to be good at a range of skills, but don’t underestimate the importance of being the best at a specific thing. You want to be the person that gets called on when that thing needs to be done.
It took a while for me to realise this particular lesson. I spent the early years of my career focusing on the journey, without any specific destination in mind. Whilst this is still one of my core motivations, it did mean that I spent periods of my early career just drifting along. The effect of this was that when family came along, which became my primary focus, I had not yet locked in what I would call my core specialisation.
9. Leave Space for Others
It’s easy to get caught up in your own journey, and most of the time no-one else is looking out for you.
But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be looking out for others. Everyone is going through their own issues and challenges, and they are looking at life through their own lens which will inevitably be different from your own.
So take the time to check-in, be open to difficult conversations, and be ready to help someone navigate their own challenges.
10. Lead from the Back
There are many different leadership styles that can be adapted to different situations. You probably have your own default leadership style.
If you are accustomed to leading from the front, being the pace-setter, and being a model corporate citizen, this lesson is asking you to take a step back from time-to-time and allow space for others to fill the void. This can feel unnatural and uncomfortable but is important to give your team time and space to flourish.
Book: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman https://thewisemangroup.com/books/multipliers/
11. Modularise
How to big things get done? They start small and iterate. This is the take-away message from Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner’s book on complex project management. This lesson can also apply to you as an individual. Do the little things well. Learn. Iterate. Modularise. Replicate.
Book: How Big Things Get Done https://sites.prh.com/how-big-things-get-done-book
Podcast: Freakonomics – In Praise of Incrementalism https://freakonomics.com/podcast/in-praise-of-incrementalism/