Are You a Mentor Leader?

Your only job is to help your players be better. That single idea had a huge impact on Tony Dungy when he heard it from one of his earliest mentors, and it led him to develop the successful leadership style so admired by players and coaches throughout the NFL. Dungy believes that good leadership is all about making the lives of your team members or workers better.

Dungy’s new book, The Mentor Leader, outlines the keys to taking a mentoring perspective on leadership. Mentor leaders seek to have a direct, intentional, and positive impact on those they lead. At its core, mentoring is about building character into the lives of others, modeling and teaching attitudes and behaviors, and creating a constructive legacy to be passed along to future generations of leaders.

Jim Caldwell, Dungy’s former assistant and successor as head coach of the Indianapolis Colts shared this observation in the book’s Foreword, Tony graciously empowered me and others to reach our full potential and take ownership of the team’s success. He was an active participant in our development, and he checked his ego at the door. He was more likely to ask questions than make decrees.

Shortsighted leadership focuses primarily on the bottom line. In football, it’s wins and losses. In business, it’s quarterly profits. Not that these things aren’t important - they are. But when they become the primary focus of a business or a team, they inevitably result in an organization that is out of balance. Leaders whose definition of success depends on such a short-term focus will one day wake up to discover they’ve missed out on what is truly important in life, namely, meaningful relationships.

The key to becoming a mentor leader is learning how to put other people first. The question that burns in the heart of the mentor leader is simply this: What can I do to make other people better?

Instead of asking, how can I lead my company, my team, or my family to a higher level of success, we should be asking ourselves, how do others around me flourish as a result of my leadership? Do they flourish at all? How does my leadership, my involvement in their lives - in whatever setting we’re in - have a positive and lasting influence and impact on them?

So much of what has been written about leadership focuses on positional leadership, that is, that one’s status, or being in charge, determines whether one is a leader. Think about it: It’s much easier to look like a leader when your followers know they can be fired for noncompliance or disobedience. But that type of oversight, governance, direction, and supervision is not mentor leadership. Mentor leaders understand that if they lose sight of people, they lose sight of the very purpose of leadership.

Simply stated, leadership is influence. By influencing another person, we lead that person. Leadership is not dependent on a formal position or role. In fact, some of the best examples of mentor leadership come from men and women whose influence extends to people who are not their subordinates.

Success for a mentor leader is measured by different standards than those commonly accepted in our society. Mentor leadership is all about shaping, nurturing, empowering, and growing. It’s all about relationships, integrity, and perpetual learning. Success is measured in changed lives, strong character, and eternal values rather than in material gain, temporal achievement, or status.

Ultimately, mentor leadership is just as successful in achieving the commonly accepted standards of accomplishment in our society. But unlike other types of leadership, it is primarily concerned with building and adding value to the lives of people in the process. It’s about changing lives.

Here are some questions to assess your current leadership mindset and to help you develop an action plan for any necessary change.

1. Evaluate your integrity: Are your actions consistent with your words?

2. Evaluate your impact: Are you making lives better?

3. Evaluate your perspective: Do you see people as central to the mission of your organization? Or do you see them simply as the means - the fuel - to get your organization from here to there?

4. Evaluate your goals: Are you building relationships, or are you building a tower to climb to the top?

5. Mentor leaders see the opportunity to interact with people - and to build into their lives along the way - as part of the journey itself. How are you looking for ways to directly engage with and influence other people?

6. How does your leadership style need to change so that people will flourish and grow around you?

7. You can lead from a position of authority, but the most effective leaders lead as they build relationships of influence. What can you do to move from an authority-based model to an influence-based model?

Resources

Gifted Leaders, giftedleaders.com