Succession is a stated priority for many CEOs. Yet, many executives let the time it takes to select and groom a successor slip away. Shenkman shows why this happens: mentoring, the best method of developing in‐house talent, take a completely different mindset from the one executives use to drive results and success in an organization. Mentoring requires attentive, slow and subtle listening skills, forgiving (even fostering) mistakes, and bringing bad news. None of these are skills fostered in the production‐oriented drive toward managerial prowess. Adapting observations detailed in his book, The Arch and the Path: The Life of Leading Greatly, Shenkman applies lessons garnered from more than 25 years in executive coaching and mentoring, as well as detailed research on the dynamics of becoming, discovering and cultivating leaders. The only way for executives to shift to a mentoring mindset is to add a new skill: that is, learn mentoring and practice it.
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1 December 2005
This article was originally published in
Handbook of Business Strategy
