Why Mentoring Makes You A Leader

The role of a leader in today’s workplace is multi-faceted and critical to an organization’s success, particularly when implementing new practices and approaches. Mentoring can be a valuable tool in strengthening the management abilities of the leader while helping to develop the abilities of the mentee. It allows employees to acquire the skills and business acumen for positive experiences, stronger outcomes and increased self-confidence. Yet, so many organizations still do not have robust mentorship programs in place nor do they include mentoring as part of the culture or internal processes despite its proven success in sports, academia, and coaching.

Mentoring helps develop both the leader and the organization by helping the leader identify what needs to be taught. It comes in many flavors, however benefits are numerous. They include providing a confidant for a newcomer to understand what is sometimes not obvious, explaining the prevailing culture and often unspoken rules, fostering improvement, increasing leadership abilities, confidence and strengthening of interpersonal relationships. Lastly, it shows that the company has empathy and is concerned with encouraging the growth of its employees, creating a positive workplace, enhancing retention and fostering loyalty through the bond it creates and the “goodness” it imprints. It is an invisible process, one that is ego-less, and designed strictly to help someone else grow.

In my experience as a mentor, I recently had the opportunity to work on a highly visible complex system-wide corporate project with multiple stakeholders in an organization unfamiliar with the service design methodologies we were going to use. The team was slightly uncomfortable with the process, as were the project leaders despite their excitement about trying something new. Thus, a great deal of “change management” efforts needed to be in place as well as alignment and planning time. We were also working on a tight deadline for the kick-off that had already been scheduled with a group that was used to working a certain way. Mentoring was one of the most critical components to the success of the project. My mentee and I had a baseline chemistry and great rapport. I let my mentee inside my head and shared my strategic dilemmas and concerns and gave him the task of leading the project, including these tasks:

·     Develop a detailed timeline and share it with existing leaders for buy-in prior to project start date. Communicate every potential barrier and opportunity with the leadership team

·     Schedule regular planning time with leadership team without the working team

·     Make sure the right people are at the work sessions, including the ones that would implement the solutions to gain their buy-in

·     Build relationships and partnerships with the project owners/leadership team

·     Identify the team’s learning styles and accommodate them while also helping them to prepare for the process

·     Prepare for all team sessions so you feel confident

·     Know that you have the expertise to do the job despite any messages and hesitation expressed from the leadership team

·     Utilize best practices from area of expertise (service design and design research)

·     Bring the working team along. Mentor them and provide guidance until they are comfortable and can see their success using a new mindset

And while my mentee is doing this, I will be teaching, coaching, cheerleading and always making sure the project is moving to a successful conclusion.

Top ten list for building innovation capacity in healthcare organizations

It has become more and more common for hospitals to create innovation centers or build innovation capacity. Hospitals that excel at continuously innovating over time can look very different from each other however, and many underestimate what is truly involved with achieving success. In my research and experience, there are several capabilities and strategies in common to hospitals with achieving high success to innovate:

1. Decide what type of innovation you want to pursue. Open collaboration, incremental, disruptive, etc. More disruptive innovation is needed in healthcare. You will need to build the ready strategy, resources, skills, time, training and technology to support it.

2. Create a mission, vision, and values. They will act as your north star and help others understand what you and the group are striving for and how to utilize your skills.

3. Catalytic leadership that empowers staff to solve problems that matter, as well as help to identify what the right problem to solve is.

4. Build a curious culture where staff have time to go beyond their day-to-day obligations, question assumptions, and constructively challenge each other and the status quo. Invite people into the process.

5. Hire diverse teams of different gender with varying attitudes, backgrounds, experiences and capabilities to generate breakthrough ideas.

6. Make it human. Talk to your customers. Find out what their needs and behaviors are. Customer centric is the norm now. Organizations that don’t understand their customers are in danger of getting left behind, but many healthcare leaders are so mired in operations, finances, metrics, demographics, optics, and “the way it has always been done” that they aren’t considering the human beings they are serving – whether patients or staff. This is a dangerous condition.

7.  Open doors that let information and insights flow into the organization from outside walls (including board members, beneficiaries and partnerships) and across the organization itself. Consider hiring an advisory board of outside experts to help your innovation center be cutting edge and not become too insular.

8. Provide idea pathways that provide structure and processes for identifying, testing, and transforming potential concepts into needle-moving solutions. Don’t pass the concept or prototype off to developers or operations to implement without your involvement, as the concept might lose the connection to customers needs. This also helps innovation stay front and center in the organization.

9. Be transparent. There’s a myth that it's better not to talk about things or to share information. This is simply not true. It leads to silos and a lack of collaboration. Transparency can lead to loyalty, increased knowledge and richer ideas.

10. Be disciplined. Innovation isn’t about sitting around eating m&ms, playing foosball, throwing darts, and just coming up with ideas. Anyone can come up with an idea. Innovation itself and the front end processes require tremendous discipline, rigor and iteration.