An outsider acting as a mentor may be able to see what the owner of a company cannot, writes Alicia Clegg on the FT website.
And companies across the spectrum can benefit from this impartial advice. Whether it’s a start-up enterprise looking for investors, a family business in transition, a successful firm looking to go global or a struggling company needing to refocus, outside advice is often the best way forward.
But once a business decides that it could benefit from mentoring, it then has to opt for the right kind of mentor. For there are as many mentoring styles as there are businesses that could benefit from being mentored.
Keith Miller, an experienced entrepreneur who turned to a mentor as his company embarked on overseas expansion, tells Alicia that mentors are hard to pigeon hole. He says: “Mentors, grey-haired daddies, coaches, non-executives: call them what you will. Like everything, it’s finding the right people that matters – but if you do, they add a tonne of value.”
As Alicia writes, the right mentoring style depends on the personalities involved and the life stage of the business.
A mentor will not come into the picture with all the solutions and call the shots. Rather, as Robert Garvey, professor of mentoring and coaching at Sheffield Hallam University, is quoted in the article: “A good mentor challenges you to be critical and pushes you to think things through. At different times a mentor can also be a listener, a counsellor and someone who offers you access to their networks.”
A good mentor will force you to ask challenging questions and come up with the right solutions yourself. As Mr Miller says in the article: “Mentoring isn’t telling people what to do. It’s helping them discover what needs to be done so they can make decisions for themselves.”
Alicia takes the example of managing director Matthew Jones, who wanted to take his father’s bespoke picture-framing operation to the next stage. With all his big plans, however, tension arose when other family members involved in the business felt they were not being included in his ideas.
Mr Jones hired a mentor and they worked with Mr Jones’ father to set up a form of corporate governance to allow Mr Jones the room to act operationally while confirming the rights of the other family members to agree budgets and core strategy.
And as Mr Jones concedes in the article: “Being mentored has helped me confront issues in the business and in myself that I needed to confront.”
But how impartial should an outside adviser be? Alicia considers the prospect of mentors who put their own money into the business and the growing trend to appoint mentors as non-executive directors.
Former Dragons’ Den investor Doug Richard is quoted as believing the best mentors contribute their own capital equity as well as their experience, after all “there’s nothing more aligning than putting your money at risk,” he says.
But But David Clutterbuck, a founder of the European Mentoring and Coaching Council, warns of a conflict of interest, especially with mentors as directors. He points out that “non-executives are responsible to the business”, while a mentor is “responsible to the entrepreneur”.
Either way, Alicia argues, what is not in doubt is that an outside adviser can add a whole lot of value to your business.
Read the full article at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/95699644-3706-11dd-bc1c-
0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1#
