Reflections - becoming a more effective team leader and mentor

Reflections - becoming a more effective team leader and mentor 

What is my WHY of leading and mentoring others? What are some practical things I can commit to doing to improve my effectiveness as a leader/mentor?  

I’ve been mulling over this topic for some weeks now, following my attendance at the inaugural Team Leader Summit for PwC Australia’s Financial Advisory division. Along with 200+ of my peers, we deep dived into the whys and hows of being an effective Team Leader.  

As a professional services / consulting firm, people are the core of the business. Each individual has a Team Leader who is a mentor/coach for them, supports them in their career development and well-being, and also has more structured responsibilities around performance review processes and other operational aspects. As our Financial Advisory leader Pete Calleja described, this role is critical in helping our people reach their potential. 

Although I’ve been to a number of similar leadership development forums in the past, I found the content by Tomorrow Architects both practical and interesting. (I’d highly recommend them for your next leadership development forum!) 

Some “gold nuggets'' that really hit home for me during the Summit: 

1. Perspectives 

In this age of disruption and transformation, increasingly polarised worldviews, lots of geopolitical and macro issues at play, we need leaders who are agile, comfortable in navigating complexity and uncertainty, who understand and appreciate difference (rather than just gravitate towards similarity), and have the ability to bring together / harness the skills and perspective of a diverse range of people. 

We did an exercise where we watched a 2 min clip about one day in the world. There were many snippets of moments from lots of cultures and locations all over the world. We were then asked to share with a partner what stood out to us most. In a room of 200 people, there were 200 different perspectives and 200 different answers of what stood out most. Interestingly (but not surprisingly), the particular thing that stood out to each person was often something that they’d experienced or relevant for their personal circumstances. For me, it was the newborn baby. For the colleague whom I paired with, it was the proposal (turns out that he’d recently proposed to his fiance). 

I was reminded that different people will see and experience things from a different perspective. Not everyone will experience the firm/company in the same way as us. 

In mentoring and leading others, don’t just assume they have the same perspectives as you. Take time to ask and draw out what it is that stood out to them, what they care about, and how they felt and experienced a particular thing. 

2. Trust is built on social capital 

How well do you really know your team members/mentees? 

How well have you really LISTENED to your team members/mentees? 

Sometimes, particularly in a company/firm context where everyone’s super busy with deadlines and other pressures, it’s easy to default to being quite transactional in the way that we see formal mentor/mentee relationships. We have 20 things from the to-do-list percolating in the brain, and we’re only really partially listening. Or perhaps we’re just ticking a box to say we’ve done our catch up. 

We did an exercise of pairing up with a colleague and allowing them to speak uninterrupted for 2 full minutes. Then I had the opportunity to ask a follow up question based on what they shared, and then another one. This exercise was referred to “asking the second and third questions”. The key was not having prepared questions to ask, but questions that stemmed out of something that the person shared. 

2 minutes is not long enough to tell your life story. But 2 minutes is long enough to go deeper than the surface-level niceties about how good/horrible the weather is, how busy we all are.. 

I was reminded of the importance of listening and asking deeper questions, and rather than going in with a pre-planned idea how I want the conversation to go, I allowed that other person to lead the conversation to where they wanted. 

Through this simple exercise, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I learnt about a colleague that I’d worked with for 5+ years, whom I thought was very different from me, only to realise now how much we have in common. 

In a mentor/mentee context, building social capital by getting to know mentees beyond the surface is important in order to build a trusted relationship. And it is when you have a trusted relationship that you can have effective development-focussed discussions, or have those harder conversations (as may be required from time to time). 

3. What’s your why? 

"A person with a strong enough why can endure almost any how." Friedrich Nietzsche.

I was challenged to think about why I care about leading and mentoring others, and why I care about the individuals I lead and mentor. 

I’ve always taken the approach that if I can share my knowledge, experience, connections, learnings to help someone else in their journey - to feel a bit better, to see a bit clearer, to point them a bit further, to take a few more steps in reaching their potential or their goals, to be a bit happier in whatever circumstance they are in.. then that’s what makes it worth it, to me. 

Besides from working out my why, I also need to understand my mentee’s why (or help them work that out). 

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If any of these “gold nuggets” resonate, or if you have any “gold nuggets” of being a leader/mentor that you’d like to share, comment below or DM me!

P.S. I’ve realised that my hesitation in posting about this for a couple of weeks is that I’m (sort of) publicly committing to put these things into action...! I invite you to ask me how I'm going in actioning these when you next catch up with me..!