Hello again everyone. Thanks again for reading my blog. Today—and probably for my next few blogs—I want to expand on the idea of mentoring, and why it’s the key ingredient to successful leadership.
Leadership and mentoring both come with a significant amount of heartache, so I’d like to tackle the more negative aspects of mentoring before we jump into the fun stuff! Don’t worry, it won’t last long!
I know from personal experience that it can be frustrating when you invest your time, talent, and treasure in another person, and that person ultimately ends up failing. It’s easy to step back and blame yourself—a good leader will always do that—and it’s also easy to want to throw in the towel. If you’re at all like me, you probably feel as though you’ve been kicked in the stomach, and that’s a feeling nobody wants repeated with the next protégé!
So why keep doing it? Why put so much of yourself out there when you never really know if it’s going to pay off or bite you in the rear? That’s what we’re going to talk about today.
First of all, we must approach all of life, including leadership, from a Christian perspective. Jesus felt the same frustrations, and the gospels record a number a times when many disciples deserted Him. In fact, after spending three years mentoring His inner circle of friends, one of them betrayed Him, another denied Him, and all of them ran for their lives when He got arrested. Talk about getting kicked in the stomach! I would imagine the emotional pain of that night far outweighed the physical pain of His beating and crucifixion!
And, yet, knowing what was to come, He still chose those twelve. He still took them under his wing, and poured Himself fully into them. Why? Was He crazy?
No, He chose them because they had the right stuff. For those of you who don’t know, the right stuff is a technical term that many leaders use to define what attributes make a good leader! We often choose to mentor people, not because of their particular skill-set, but because of the character qualities they possess. Like Jesus, we look for those who can follow now and lead later.
And just like the disciples, who later led the newborn Christian Church quite successfully, we can’t necessarily see what’s going to happen to our protégés when they leave the nest. You see, if our goal in mentoring is only to impact our own success, we are not truly mentoring. Our goal should always be to impact peoples’ lives.
This means we may get kicked in the stomach a few times, but by pouring ourselves into others, we are sowing seeds that will reap a harvest in their lives and our own. We cannot be unsuccessful when we approach mentoring from this perspective because The Law of the Harvest—you reap what you sow (Gal. 6:7)—is a universal law. It cannot be circumvented.
You must also realize that failure is part of our natural maturation process. So you will fail in your mentoring from time to time, and your protégés will sometimes fail in their protégé-ing (like my new word?). God loves humility, and the only way to breed this in His children is to allow failure in our lives. If we always succeed, it’s easy—especially for us Type A personalities—to get cocky and feel invincible. That’s dangerous ground, and God doesn’t want us on dangerous ground unless He puts us there.
Your reaction to the kick in the stomach can be a mentoring tool in itself. Have you considered that? The last time a protégé “fled” from you, how did you handle it? If you harbored bitterness or resentment, you may have inadvertently laid a foundation for that person to react the same way when it happens to him or her. And it will.
So what would Jesus do? Cliché as it may sound, you should ask yourself this question before you react to any situation, especially when someone hurts or angers you. Mercy triumphs over judgment (James 2:13) and God cannot forgive you unless you forgive others (Matt. 7:2), so it’s probably best if you approach these wounds as growth opportunities!
Regardless, mentoring is intrinsic to good leadership, so even if you tried to give up on it, I’m sure most of you couldn’t! Knowing that, some of the above advice may help, and if not, you may just want to drop your breastplate a little lower to soften those kicks!
Next time, we’ll continue to look at the role mentoring plays in defining great leaders, so tune in then…
February 2nd, 2009 at 5:21 pm
Awesome post sir.
Very encouraging and influential.
February 24th, 2009 at 11:03 pm
Dear Mr. Sutton,
Thank you so much for your article and your interest in mentoring. As a mentor of 20+ years my heart is encouraged whenever I see a human being care about another human being.
I would make this one suggestion to enhance your article and in my heart I believe Jesus would agree; and that is, just as Mentor cared for Telemachus each man that chooses to guide another would do it without any expectation of a return – of any kind. He or she mentors out of love – agape love. I don’t believe Jesus wanted anything back from the disciples – or us!
Everything He did, He did because He loved us, period, end of story. It was without expectation. That was His leadership and so it should be with ours.
Our mentoring, if designed after His example, is full of giving. That’s enough. He knew the seeds would grow at some point so it was pointless to expect a return. He did it out of love. If we are giving of ourselves for any other reason, no matter how noble, in my humble opinion we are not following his example!
Just plant the seeds with love. It is the love of the Father that will make them grow, just as it did for the disciples.
May His love always be with you.
Bruce