Mentoring Potential Leaders

Mentoring Potential Leaders

Mentoring has been defined as a process of an integrated approach to advising, coaching, and nurturing others with a focus on creating a viable relationship to enhance an individual’s personal growth and development.

The following factors can help to determine whether a person has the potential for leadership training:

* Hard working

* Steps up to leadership opportunities

* Has integrity

* Respects others

* Admits mistakes

* Seeks out and welcomes feedback

* Passion for results

* Capacity to create or catch vision

* Enthusiastic and positive

* Willing to take responsibility

* Peer respect

* Ability to listen to others

* Willing to take risks

* Self confidence

* Aware of own strengths and weaknesses

* Commits to reaching goals

* Has a desire and ability to learn

* Is effective in managing money

* Communicates well

* Thinks creatively

* Operates with a healthy work ethic

Mentoring involves a relationship in which one person helps develop and empower another.

Having mature persons investing in one’s life will pay huge dividends in a person’s development. Emerging leaders have a lot to learn from seasoned veterans. It is important to take the initiative to build long lasting relationships with those that can impart wisdom, knowledge, and experience into one’s life.

Through effective mentoring, potential leaders can achieve their highest potential, just as a coach can help an athlete achieve success. Leaders at every level need to enhance their natural talent with practice.

Providing a mentoring opportunity to others will allow their development to be accelerated. This investment is beneficial for the individual as well as for the organization. The vast majority of leaders find that mentoring potential leaders is one of the most rewarding of all their responsibilities.

Mentoring is a gratifying means by which mentors can pass on the rich lessons they have learned throughout their leadership tenure.

Leadership that lacks integrity, ethics, and character has become a common occurrence. However, there are people with the necessary character and skills who need to invest their capacity in others.

All potential leaders benefit from role models they can respect and emulate. Quite often, people identify role models based on shared outlook and connections to similar experiences. However, mentors who are different in race, gender, or other characteristics, have a vital role to play in mentoring.

Individuals with a mentor advance further and faster and experience fewer adjustment problems than those without mentors.

Mentoring is a process

Mentoring is not an overnight occurrence. It is a process that takes time to mature. This is largely due to the fact that a major aspect of effective mentoring is relationship building which takes time and effort.

Mentoring is a structured process. There is specific information, skills, attitudes, and behaviors that need to be transferred to the potential leader. Mentoring is a process balanced on relationship and structure.

Mentoring is a two-way process

Mentoring requires that both the mentor and trainee commit to the mentoring process. The process is not one-sided.

Potential leaders need to make the effort to learn from their mentors and the mentor needs to be willing to provide the necessary information needed.

The foundation of mentoring is leadership

No mentoring process can be effective without some form of leadership as its origin. Leadership is the driving force behind human activity and is therefore the driving force behind mentoring.

The mentor can only transfer what he or she possesses

This is a critical principle. The mentor can only transfer the skills and knowledge that he or she has. It is essential to grasp the reality that people generally go only as far as their mentor leads or allows them to go. A mentor cannot take a person where they have not been themselves.

Growing as a leader

Leading well, however, is a great challenge. Becoming a leader is not a destination, but a journey of learning. Leading well requires learning well.

Fundamental to leading and growth is a commitment to a lifelong journey of learning.

Being given a challenging job is the single most important motivation for the teachable leader to learn and grow into the next level of leadership competence. Nothing in leadership development is more powerful than connecting real-life situations that demand strategic solutions.

Growing as a leader is a long journey of learning within the realities of a lifetime of experiences. The journey requires building a blend of qualities, characteristics, and competencies that will serve them well.

Mentoring Christian leaders

Hebrews 13:17 - Obey those who rule over you, and be submissive, for they watch out for your souls, as those who must give account. Let them do so with joy and not with grief, for that would be unprofitable for you.

Ephesians 4:11-16 - And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting, but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head – Christ - from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love.