Page 217 - The Bible On Leadership

Leadership Development 203

Kermit Campbell, CEO of Herman Miller, is a strong believer in the
power of mentoring and developing leaders. He brought his thirty top
operating managers together so they could develop a strategy for action.
In the process, they developed each other as well. ‘‘The participation
was very intense, and it kept feeding on itself, and by the time the half-
day was complete, we had, as a group, gone to a much higher level
than we had ever achieved before. That’s what I feel I should be doing
as a CEO, taking each of us to a higher plane.’’ 9
Two leaders who took each other to a higher plane were Esther and
Mordechai. Esther had quite unexpectedly become the queen of all Per-
sia, when only the day before she had been just an attractive Jewish
adolescent. Mordechai, the ‘‘mentor,’’ had the advantage of more life
experience and access to the world outside the palace. Esther had the
advantage of her great beauty (which had grabbed the king’s attention
and loyalty), her position inside the palace, and a pretty clever head on
her shoulders. Unlike Ahab, Jezebel, and Samson, she was supremely
‘‘developable.’’
And working with her mentor, she accomplished the following,
which would look good on any young manager’s (or queen’s) perfor-
mance appraisal:

❖ Became the first and only Jewish queen of Persia
❖ Reversed a decree that would have resulted in the genocide of
her people
❖ Persuaded the king to offer her half of his kingdom
❖ Asked instead for the preservation of her people, and succeeded
❖ Succeeded in having her mentor led triumphantly around the
city on a horse by his worst enemy
❖ Succeeded in having her people’s worst enemy removed per-
manently from the organization

Neither Esther nor Mordechai could have achieved these goals with-
out the other, which is the essence of mentoring.
Norman Brinker is a restaurateur who knows the value of mentoring
and coaching from both ends. He started out as a prote ´ge ´ of Robert