Mentoring is also a leadership responsibility

I love mentoring young people. It's not merely in response to the call to leadership to help grow and upskill new talent, it's because I really enjoy chatting to enthusiastic youngsters to see how I can help make their dreams come to life. And when it comes to pass that I was able to help in a small way, well, how much more fulfilling can life actually be than to see someone flourish under your advice!

Being a mentor is probably a privilege that I have come to realise quite late in my career, and perhaps just as well as there is quite a lot of skill and responsibility involved to properly interpret what it is that the young person is trying to say, and trying to achieve. I say this because I believe that you can't really properly guide someone if you haven't yourself trod the path before.

So, onto real mentoring then. Teboho Mogoto approached me looking for a mentoring relationship. Being curious to understand how he interpreted our relationship, I asked him to write a short piece on his experience. Here's what he had to say:

In my search for a mentor, I finally reached out to Guy Pearce the CEO of New Business Development at the JD Group in SA. He is the most humble, knowledgeable and friendly CEO one can meet out-there with a great sense of humor. Being with him in His office for the first time, didn’t feel like being with someone with great power and high authority but being with a brother, a best friend, a father and someone you can trust with your most horrible secrets, lol…We are now in a mentoring relationship, as he has designed some projects for me to work on and he’ll be there for me every step of the way providing any kind of help I may need in the successful completion of these projects. The man is amazing, every member of his staff including the security guards to his offices are allowed to walk into his office and talk to him directly & even share their own jokes with him.

I really enjoyed his point of view because it taught me that not only are hard skills and experiences invaluable in a mentoring relationship, attitude and living by example can also be invaluable in helping to shape young minds! 

Ultimately, while mentoring and mentorship are possibly quite difficult to define with precision, it is really about the transfer and leverage of such social capital that helps our societies become more productive over time. I look forward to these sessions, indeed, examining my diary shows that I have an appointment with another mentee on Friday. I can't wait!