Managers As Mentors, 3rd Edition

Mentoring THE BOSS

How do you mentor someone in a higher position? The most common answer you will hear to that question is, “Very carefully!”

As we have explored throughout this book, risk taking is tantamount to growth, and mixing learning and power produces a concoction that is typically risk-averse. This mixture is particularly powerful when mentoring a person in a higher position. Yet more and more organizations are, for example, asking younger employees who hold lower positions in the organization but possess key skills to be mentors to leaders in higher positions who need those skills. Consider, for example, the computer-illiterate CEO who asks the whiz-bang computer nerd in the bowels of the IT department, “Come up to mahogany row and ...