Mentor Don't Manage

Hello. Hello. So, welcome. I actually am doing something kind of fun today. I am giving you a podcast that is actually an excerpt from my new program for women who lead. It's called Lead. It's, after years of trying to have very complicated titles, I'm just calling it Lead cuz that's what you need to do, mama.

So you're gonna get to tune into an excerpt in one of the modules, and it's called Mentoring Over Managing. And I'm also gonna share with you in this episode an excerpt from one of the Voxer messages that I left one of my clients. As many of you know, I have a few options when you work with me and my team. One of them is that you can join our hotline and you can get ongoing feedback. And the other one is that if you are a private client, or in my Sage think tank, you work with me privately in a private Voxer.

We do a lot of conversations. I have them all day, every day. It's my favorite way to support women. So I'm pulling exactly what I said to a client about this topic so that you can hear it applied in a real circumstance as well. So I'm excited about this episode. So let's go ahead and get started.

Hi, welcome. In this lesson I wanna talk to you about mentorship versus management. Mentorship is a lost art. It's interesting because it used to be such a huge part of what we do. If you think about really where we are as a society. We used to have apprenticeship. Think about long ago, like shoemakers, right? You would have an apprentice, like, I have Pinocchio in my mind somehow. Anyway, we had apprentices, right? Andyou would move up, you would work with the master, and the master would teach you everything he knows. And then you would then be the shoemaker, you would be the person, the plumber, et cetera, right? There's a lot packed in here.

But what we've watched over the years is the slow death of that art. There's some real reasons for that, right? Somewhere along the line, probably in the sixties-ish, seventies, we started to overemphasize the importance of four year education and advanced education over trades, over learning how to do things that you could do with your hands. So then all this, this whole art of mentorship, teaching people how to be a thing died, has been dying.

And now we're really experiencing the truth of that in the world, because we have a huge deficit in almost every trade, on the planet when it comes to plumbers and welders and pipe layers and all these things. Now, what does that have to do with your business? Well, what we did instead is we told people to go get these four year degrees, and then we put them in companies and they got managed, right? We didn't really embrace mentorship, and we didn't really teach managers how to coach. We just taught them how to manage and not even very well.

And so where we are today is this entire several generations of team members who haven't been mentored, and bosses who haven't been mentored, and haven't seen that modeled. And that is showing up in the way that we confront performance issues with our team.

So I wanna tell you a story. When I was - well, it wasn't about me - a couple years ago, my daughter, she's a goalkeeper, as many of you know. I talk about this a lot. And she had a coach and he was a new coach to her. And from the get go, she wasn't a fan, but you know, she had to go to training with this guy. And so she did. And she was having a bad day. I don't really even remember the details, but regardless, she was really frustrated and it's not like her to get like that, but she was so frustrated. She walked off the field and she went away. She was just mad.

Part of it was this coach was a teaser. Some coaches, that's their approach. They tease, they haze, they insult, to try and motivate. I've never understood that, but whatever. He didn't have permission with her to do that because they didn't have a relationship, and so she walked off. Well, his response to that was to basically cut her off as dead. He called, well my husband called him and said, "You know, I'm concerned. Kate's never acted like this before. She's an elite athlete. What do you think, coach?"

And his response was, "You know, well, she needs to get it together. She can't act like that. That's not a D1 athlete." And my husband, of course, he's so brilliant, he's talking to this guy and he's like, "But you're her coach. Can you coach her?"

But he just got mad at her. Shut her off, and that was the beginning of the end. She never went back to this dude's training ever again. Now she has other coaches and it's worked out really great and she's great. It was a bad day for her. But he had such an opportunity. Here's someone who wants to do well. She's an elite athlete and she had a bad day and he wrote her off, instead of mentoring, instead of coaching. And he didn't even manage, he just basically fired her in his brain.

And I want you to notice that. I think you probably do that too, cuz I think we all do. We hire people into our company and if they aren't immediately exactly what we want, we fire them in our brain, we don't mentor. So in this lesson I'm gonna talk to you about what mentorship is.

And why? It's vital if you wanna build a team. If you just want to get people to come in and do transactional effort, forget it. Don't worry about it. But that's not what I think you want. That's not why you're listening to this. You wanna build a team of people who understand what your values are, who understand what your expectations are, who are eager to deliver, who are part of something that is beautiful.

And that means you have to leverage mentorship. In your defense, and in my defense, it is a lost art and it is a lost practice. But I believe that if you could learn and adopt a mentorship and a leadership philosophy to how you run your business, instead of a management and a command control approach, that will change everything for you.

All right, so we're gonna get into our lesson, and I'm gonna really sink in here. I really want- the truth is we have to be honest with ourselves about this stuff. We have to be able to say, yeah, that's probably true. And if we want it to change, then we have to change our posture in the way that we lead. Okay? And that's what I'm gonna invite you to do in the next series of lessons. So let's go.

So now that we've tuned into that, let's listen to me giving some feedback in a Voxer message to one of my clients, and I will talk to you next time.

Okay. So think you told me she's eight years younger than you. I'm trying to remember how old you are, but I think that smack dabs her in millennial era. Am I right? You know, I don't like to stereotype, but I do think it's all part of the picture, right? Everybody gets a prize. Everybody gets to be recognized. Everybody gets to do their thing. Nobody gets to be told no. Like, keep it all in mind that some of this is, it's not personal. It's how she was socialized to think about who she should be in the world.

And you are introducing a new idea to her. And the big picture is this is why it's so frustrating, to hire people, often at a higher level from other companies, because they don't hold people accountable. They don't have these kinds of conversations. They don't mentor people. Then they end up in your business and your business has to deal with the reeducation of the willing. Not all of them are, as you're finding.

So I just- mostly what I want for you, between you and I, is to depersonalize this because that's the thing that's gonna make this the most challenging for you. And if we can move into understanding, at a broader level, that she has a lived experience that is informing her of what her life should look like, and what she should be entitled to, and what she's earned, and all the things that you're saying. And you have a lived experience that says, "Yeah no, that's not even close to earning, right? You wanna talk about earning, let me tell you what I had to do to earn where I am." Right?

So there's this underbelly going on here that isn't gonna serve you if you keep internalizing it as about you. Okay? So in the leadership role, in her mentor role, we're gonna look at her from that vantage point, and I think whether she chooses to stay with you or not, you have an opportunity to educate and mentor her for as long as she's with you. And I think as long as you aren't in the personal pool here with her, you can be very effective.

Now, whether she learns it, whether she embraces it, whether she decides to make a change, that's totally up to her, love. And let it be. Just let it be. Okay? So we can keep moving through that, but that is the crux here.

It's not about her and it's not about what you say. It's really ultimately about how you feel so that if you can feel better, we can move you through this faster.

Lead for Women is now open for registration. If you're a woman and you are also a visionary, somebody who sees the world differently than it is, and you are eager to achieve that through your work and by leveraging the hearts and minds of others, then I invite you to go to thevisionary.CEO/lead and learn everything you can about our Lead program.

While it's not for everyone, it really is for you if you are a woman who is ready to learn how to think better, so you can lead better, and you can live better. You have a legacy to leave here and I wanna help you leave it by enhancing and improving how you show up as a woman who leads. Join us there.