Page 40 - Roy W. Rice - CEO Material How to Be a Leader in Any Organization-McGraw-Hill (2009)

You Have a Good Track Record • 21

need it. You can sit and be vulnerable with the person about things you
can’t discuss with peers, subordinates, or bosses. You can vent about pro-
fessional progress and office politics, and you can get guidance when you
want accelerated learning in market changes, financial issues, staffing,
strategy, risk assessment, etc.
Mentors are your sounding board as you make major and challeng-
ing decisions, so select ones who are more accomplished, at a higher level,
and have gone farther than you. You want ones who’ve seen more, done
more, and are “more than a page ahead of you in the instruction manual.”
You need at least some of them to have lived through inflationary cycles
as well as significant geopolitical events. Whatever age you are you need
to get older ones, younger ones, and ones from diverse cultures and the
opposite sex too.
Any single individual will not fit all your needs or be available every
time you need advice, so you need multiple mentoring friendships. In
addition, certain mentors fit for certain times and predicaments.
With the large number of issues you may want to discuss before you
act, you “don’t want to drain one person dry.” Keep in mind that a good
mentor has his or her own mentors too, so any single individual might be
consumed with his or her own issues when you need him or her for your
issues.

Everybody talks about having a mentor, but in reality, it happens
less than it should. And it’s impossible to get to the CEO job with-
out one. I got lucky and had several gentlemen who fine-tuned my
maturing process socially, culturally, artistically, and business-wise.

In some companies, early in your career, mentors are picked for you
in an organized program. Use but don’t rely on whoever is assigned to
you. Getting one assigned to you can be a bit of an unpleasant obligation
for that individual unless you prove to be someone he or she really wants
to mentor—and would do so with or without the “assignment.” The
advantage for you in getting one assigned is that it’s likely to be someone
you normally wouldn’t have access to. Obviously, since the company
thinks the person merits being a mentor, he or she is certainly worth your
fullest use.
A drawback of an internal mentor, especially an “arranged” one, is
the potential candor pitfall, where the things you discuss get shared