In operational and customer-facing roles particularly and in others there are hundreds of day-to-day decisions that people must make to ensure that the overall goals are met. While most of these decisions will be based on the overall goals or SOPs laid out by the organisations there will always be several unique learnings which will be there in each of these activities.
In today’s fast paced work scenario very often the person successfully taking those decisions themselves might not be aware of the various learnings that they have picked up during the whole episode. Hundreds of such learnings will continue to stay as tacit knowledge within those individuals or the teams involved. Such tacit knowledge resides in the intangible realm of experience, intuition, and emotions.
Mentorship helps in such situations in the following ways.
1. Converting these thumb rules which would have been created in the sub conscious minds of the concerned individuals into a more detailed understanding of what really went into the success in that situation.
2. Understand the actual background and factors which contributed to the success in the situation.
3. Understand similar situations where such innovation and learning can be used for better results.
4. Build these into the organisation’s process and practices so that it gets transferred into explicit knowledge which can be used across the organization.
Why mentorship is ideally suited for this transfer of knowledge.
1. it utilizes the experiences of the mentor in identifying, understanding, and tackling the various challenges and situations which very often the normal person might not even notice or at times even after noticing fail to understand the opportunity or understand a challenge that is coming up in the initial stages itself.
2. The mentor also uses his vast experience to understand the situation in greater detail to capture all factors that really led to the success or even failure of any activity or event or project.
3. The mentor is widely respected within the industry or in that sport for his own achievements and capabilities that all people or rather majority of people are willing to listen to him and consider and accept the suggestions being put forth by the mentor.
4. It is not only in success but also in failures where there are several learnings which need to be understood which will help the team to institutionalize these learnings. Generally, people tend to hide their failures and shy away from talking about them. Mentorship helps build the comfort within the team to openly discuss these failures and learn from the various experiences that they had had during the same.
I was recollecting the movie 2018 while writing this which is based on the floods in Kerala in 2018 which also portrays how such an unprecedented situation unfolded suddenly because there was no living memory of such a situation in probably more than the last 100 plus years and hence there was no one who could really understand the evolving situation and start pre-emptive action before things got out of hand.
The management of cyclones by Odisha is a live study. Because this state is hit by cyclone almost every year the precautions to be built in from the time of the first warning is now institutionalized within this state and though cyclone still hits the state as before there is hardly any loss of life due to the same. Seeing the success of these measures, people also wholeheartedly follow these suggestions which leads to more successful results.
Some time back I was watching a film awards ceremony of the Malayalam film industry where budding new actor Tovino Thomas was given the best actor award for the year by Malayalam superstar Mamooty. In his acceptance speech Tovino was recollecting some of the various learnings that he had picked up by watching Mamooty on screen in his growing up years. Since they are more experienced and more successful in their fields the team looks up to them and listens and tries to understand their point of view, which also ensures better understanding and transfer of knowledge. As in the above example, the learning sometimes can also happen without even the mentor being physically present or being even aware that people are watching him and learning from him.
The same was the case with Dhoni and Saurabh in the Indian Cricket team during earlier years and Rohit Sharma today. In fact, most the successful captains and leaders knowingly or unknowingly play this role. Younger and brighter people also identify and blossom under these people as they feel they have the full backing of their leader and go ahead fearlessly implementing the plans laid out by the team.
Mentors act like guides, showing the way and helping people become better at what we do. They teach us important lessons, like how to work hard, stay focused, and never give up. Mentors are like builders, helping to create a strong foundation for future generations to build upon. They make sure that knowledge and talent continue to shine bright for everyone to see and under all conditions. To continue getting more insights on such similar topics subscribe to my LinkedIn page, Rejo’s Business Bytes, or my website, rejofrancis.com.
