Maverick Mastery®

For centuries successful leaders have utilised the services of a mentor, who they see as their trusted advisor and sounding board. When there are important decisions to be made or opportunities to assess or realise they often turn to their mentor for guidance, support and expert knowledge.

When others are struggling, accomplished leaders seize the opportunity to access the resources of their mentor. The ability to seek advice is a key strength and differentiator from their competition and is often the real secret of their success.

Business leaders seek a mentor for the following reasons:

• Having the ability to confide in someone outside of the company

• Having an objective sounding board

• Receiving support and advice on team dynamics

• Staying ahead of the game by receiving knowledge from other industries

• Continuous CEO development

• A more successful and sustainable company

Seeking and learning from your mentor

There are a number of ways to seek a mentor; first you could approach a leadership company like Dynamic Transitions, you could ask for recommendations or you could search on the internet. Whichever method you choose it is important that the following criteria are considered as an absolute minimum:

• Your proposed mentor has the expertise that you need

• You like and trust your proposed mentor

• Your mentor ‘walks their talk’

• There is mutual respect

• Your mentor is appropriate to your style and can provide the right advice for you

• They are inspirational and motivational

Choosing the right mentor can be key to your success, which is why finding that special person is imperative. Often business owners can be seduced into picking a mentor based on superficial measures such as a good flashy website, a brochure with great pictures and flowing words and a great marketing sales page. I believe that it is vital that you spend time talking to your potential mentor, understanding their background and where their expertise and credibility lies. An appreciation of their style and preferred ways of working is essential. When choosing your mentor it’s important that you consider someone who will role model change for you. Someone that you can rely on to demonstrate the correct paths for you to take.

Mentors must be able to challenge you especially if you have a strong personality. They should be unafraid to hold you to account and question your decisions or thought process. They should compliment your skills and be able to help you strengthen your weaknesses. A business mentor should understand how to utilise social media especially if you have a service business. They should be able to help you demonstrate your reputation and expertise both online and offline. In service related businesses people buy from experts not generalists, therefore you need to ensure that your mentor can help you demonstrate your expertise.

If your marketing strategy includes networking as an important component then it’s essential that not only does your mentor understand how to help you build an effective networking strategy, but that they can demonstrate how they use their networking expertise. You will be spending significant amounts of time with your mentor so it’s important that you are compatible and that you respect and trust them. A mentoring relationship is a developmental one and it is key that your mentor can flex their own style to suit your preferred method of learning. To be able to learn from your mentor in addition to the above criteria needing to take place, you need to be:

• open to the guidance of your mentor

• willing to take risk

• prepared to be accountable

• open to change

• willing to change the status quo

When you are good at what you do it can be very difficult to take advice from someone else. When you are working with your mentor it is important to remember that you are NOT handing over executive decision making. No mentor would advocate that their mentee abdicates decision making responsibility, but that they listen to advice and base their decisions on all the available facts. We have found that a significant proportion of business owners are impulsive and therefore do not consider all their options when making major decisions for their business. This can have an adverse effect unless this impulsiveness is harnessed and utilised effectively.

Main models of mentoring

There are a number of different ways that business leaders can access mentoring from their mentors. We have found that the most effective methods are either a) Mentoring on a one to one basis or b) Peer Mentoring.

Mentoring on a one to one basis allows a developmental relationship which is quite focused and structured. The mentor can enable their mentee to achieve their objectives, be challenged in a safe environment and be held accountable. This type of mentorship facilitates a direct knowledge transfer and can significantly reduce the learning curve of the mentee.

Peer Mentoring suits business leaders that prefer to be surrounded by their peers to share learning and experiences. The advantage of this method of mentoring is that whilst the mentor facilitates interaction within the group, the mentee has access to a group of likeminded individuals with differing levels of experience and wisdom. The mentee can leverage the wisdom of this confidential group.

Should a business leader have more than one mentor?

A resourceful and ambitious business leader will ensure that he surrounds himself with the right people to develop and support him through his own growth and the success of the company. It can be beneficial to have more than one mentor as long as it is clear exactly what it is that they are mentoring you in. It is important that for one subject you only have one expert providing you with advice. This ensures that you are not overloaded or being provided with conflicting information. For example a business leader may be mentored on how he gets on with his team and improving team dynamics as well as being mentored on how to deliver a successful business strategy.

Mentoring should continue for as long as the task that the mentor was hired to help the leader achieve is incomplete. This could mean the mentoring may last from one month to a number of years. The frequency of interaction may alter depending on the task.

Does mentoring always work?

There are only two main reasons why mentoring doesn’t work. If there is a bad fit between the mentor and mentee or if the business leader is not ready to be open and honest with his mentor and be willing to move out of his comfort zone.

For example, I was working with an established business leader who had recently moved to a new company. The company was very dysfunctional; his top team was inefficient beset with personality and competency issues, poor morale issues amongst the employees and severe union issues. To add to his problems they were losing key customers, haemorrhaging money and the shareholders were not happy. They gave him a very tight timescale in which to achieve turnaround results.

The business leader was unable to confide in his team and was unclear as to where the true starting point was and whether there was a common root to the company’s issued.

By working closely together he was able to see clearly the issues that were faced by the company. To segregate the problems caused by his top team and the consequences of devalued and de-motivated employees. By tackling these key areas, he understood that these were the causes of customer dissatisfaction and poor bottom line results.

He learnt that his own leadership style was adding to the problem and how best to interact with others to ensure that he got the results that he wanted. He understood how to get the best out of his team and how to implement the best processes to deal with the technical deficiencies.

Under his tenure the company improved its fortunes, his team increased their competence and the union difficulties improved as they saw the employees being better treated. This had a positive effect on the bottom line. The business leader benefited from having a trusted advisor who was removed from the company, who could provide objective guidance and advice.

Mentoring is often much more beneficial to business leaders than traditional coaching practices as it provides senior management with an external sounding bound, someone who can practically assess and advise on the problematic issues within the organisation as a whole, and will not just sit back and wait for the answers to ‘come from within’. Mentoring works when the mentee understands the needs to be challenged and to continue his personal development to realise his achievements and to ensure the likelihood of his company’s success.

In the current economic climate, the biggest headache for most small businesses is the costs associated with managing and employing staff. Ultimately, this comes down to one key question; are businesses spending too much time carrying out activities that they are not adequately trained to do? Business Mentor and management specialist Judith Germain explains why small businesses need to review the costs of their HR activities and explains why outsourcing non-core activities is so critical in today’s competitive marketplace.

It is inevitable that many entrepreneurs and small business owners will reach the point where they need to support the growth of their business by taking on additional staff, but many are put off doing so by the deluge of rules and regulations covering every aspect of the HR process. As a result, many businesses spend a great deal of unnecessary time and energy on managing their processes instead of running and growing their business.

In this article, we are going to look at the most common HR issues, which cause problems for small businesses and what can be done to ensure these areas are carried out more efficiently.

1. Legislation

Small businesses spend a lot of time trying not to fall foul of the increasing levels of legislation that befall them. Whilst legislation can be a good thing it can have a disproportionate effect on a small business.

For example the Disability Discrimination Act can see small businesses paying huge sums for failing to follow good processes and investigating absence claims properly. Many small businesses do not see the need for establishing absence policies believing that because the business has a family atmosphere there will not be any issues. This is beset with problems as once an employee falls ill, especially if their illness falls under the DDA, then the employee is often encouraged to claim against the employer in pursuit of the huge payouts that is perceived to be available to them. This can cause the business to spend an inordinate amount of time defending a DDA claim which is costly not only in management time but also in professional costs (ie external lawyers).

There is little understanding of the DDA amongst business owners and yet it is one of the most pervasive employment laws affecting businesses. Having a good absence policy can reduce the risk of a DDA claim and it is worth investing in getting such policies drawn up by a HR professional to ensure they meet the needs of the business and the requirements of the DDA.

2. Absence Policies

Whilst absence from work due to sickness is inevitable, businesses need to consider whether the amount of time taken off is reasonable and reflected across the wider business, as there may be underlying issues which are affecting the bottom line that are being missed or masked as ‘absence from work’.

If sickness/absenteeism levels are out of the ordinary (or relating to certain department(s) only) then it could suggest that there is a more serious underlying problem involving the management of the business. This could be due to poor management style, ineffective methods of delivery, low department morale, low motivation etc.

For example, where a department is under threat of redundancy, absenteeism is relatively low and attendance is stable (due to the fear that any days off work could mean that they are chosen for redundancy). But alongside this most organisations will find that there is an increase in absenteeism in other departments as a direct result of the redundancy threat in another department. More often than not this is due to low morale and upset about the pending redundancies.

The key challenge is to look at the company as a whole, and tackle the causes of absence and not the symptoms of it. This could mean a stronger reliance on preventative methods rather than just reactive ones. Thus ensuring that any issues with management efficiency and style as well as employee morale and motivation are identified and resolved at an early stage in order to avoid impacting on absence levels later down the line.

It is worth looking for a consultant who specialises in leadership and development issues who can come into the business and identify and resolve these issues at the core before they have a knock-on effect throughout the entire business.

3. Recruitment

Particularly in smaller businesses, the most crucial task of Recruitment is often undertaken by untrained employees. This can cause a minefield of potential dangers. It’s important to be able to recruit and retain the right employees because replacing an employee on average can cost a business between £5k – £10k.

Remember, businesses may face claims of discrimination in their recruitment process (which are unlimited). One option for small businesses looking to recruit new staff is to hire recruitment agencies to do it instead, as they can reduce the risk and overall cost of the firm doing it itself.

4. HR software for Payroll, Talent Management etc

For many businesses, HR software can bring a number of benefits, the most primary one being a significant cost reduction for the company in terms of administrative time, reduced staff turnover and HR headcount.

Significant improvements in how a company recruits and retains its employees can be established by using Talent Management software as it can provide detailed knowledge of the cause and effect of current and proposed recruitment strategies. Another area where Talent Management software comes into its own is in managing absence. Accurate record keeping, trends analysis and objective assessment can lead to increased attendance, lower costs and avoidance of expensive legislative issues flowing from contravening the DDA as mentioned earlier.

However, HR software should be treated with caution as one of the mistakes that companies make typically when buying integrated Talent Management software is allowing finance, payroll and procurement needs to influence the choice of system with limited input from a HR perspective. This often means that the significant cost savings and performance improvement that could be achieved by having a detailed knowledge of the talent of the organisation are never utilised, because they can be seen as expensive intangible factors for non HR practitioners. This can make the new system an expensive acquisition for small businesses with little practical use in managing the talent of a diverse workforce.

There is nothing worse than spending a small fortunue on a new piece of software only to end up never using it, so it is worth seeking advice from a HR specialist when considering the various HR software options available to ensure that the most suitable option is chosen for the needs of the business.

6. Pastoral Care

Perhaps the most cost effective and efficient means of reducing HR costs is probably the simplest and most overlooked; listening and talking to employees! A happy workforce will be productive, efficient and loyal and simply by looking after staff and ensuring that their needs are met through the business, there will be less absence, less overtime costs and less recruitment costs as staff churn reduces.

Mentoring and Coaching programmes are the most effective way of managing the personal and professional needs of employees and I have come across many situations where a simple miscommunication or misunderstanding between management and employees could have potentially had a disastrous effect on the business if it had not been nipped in the bud during an early mentoring session.

When evaluating the costs associated with managing and running a small business, it is crucial to indentify areas which take up a disproportionate amount of time and detract from the overall growth and development of the business. Outsourcing the more lengthy or risky HR activities such as recruitment, payroll etc can free up valuable time within the business to focus on more critical areas such as the development and well being of employees and their motivation and desire to help make the business prosper.