Mentors Can Help Leaders "Heed the Call"

By Michael Shenkman

We have often heard how leading is a calling. That means certain people step into the role, accept it and build their lives around its challenges, demands and joys. But ask anyone who leads and they'll tell you that the call doesn't come through a bullhorn blaring the message that others are anxiously awaiting your leadership.

The call to leadership is subtle. It usually starts with a nagging dissatisfaction with the status quo. The potential leader detects that something isn't right (as we all do) and wants to take responsibility for making things better. What's more, this potential leader envisions something so large that it requires the collaboration of many people to accomplish it. Some people feel they have a technical or service solution to a problem that others couldn't solve. But only those who take responsibility to act on that, joining with others, actually translate that feeling to a company.

For other potential leaders, the call comes as a feeling that the situation demands more from them but they don't know what more they can do. The engineer can't be any more brilliant; the marketer can't be any more prescient in her analysis. Yet, those technical accomplishments don't seem to satisfy the way they used to. These people seek a different kind of satisfaction.

So what turns the trick? What can tune the person in to the call to leading? Every leader I work with cites the fact that someone else took notice of his or her longing and identified it as the kind of longing leaders have. "She saw something in me I didn't realize I had" is a common recollection. And having recognized the calling to leadership, the mentor nurtured his or her prospect on that path, taking care to get the prospect's "skills of character"—self-awareness, people skills, practical insight, and drive—in balance. Then the mentor helped the prospect meld that combination of concerns and skills into a state of resolve and acceptance, so that the leadership energy that was welling up would strike a heart and mind ready to take action.

Heeding the call to lead, unlike heeding a call that comes to an artist or a prophet, is one of those rare human events that happens only in the context of significant relationships with other people. The call can be missed because of its subtlety but, mostly, it can be missed because leaders need to be recognized. Alone, most of us wouldn't know what that static we are hearing is all about. That first recognition is the crucial step, and a mentor is often the one who dampens the noise so that the potential leader can get the message.

That call itself may be welcomed, feared or even refused. But with a mentor's help, at least such noise can become a strong signal capable of getting translated into a critical decision: to lead or not.

To learn more about mentoring and leadership, consider these AMA seminars:

• Motivating for Results: Bringing Out the Best in People
  
• Developing Executive Leadership
  
• Developing Leaders at All Levels
  

Author Bio: Michael Shenkman is president of the Strategic Implementation Group of Keystone International, Inc., a consulting firm in Albuquerque, New Mexico, specializing in leadership development and organizational change. Contact him at 505-797-8881 or mshenkman@archofleadership.com