I am presently mentoring people at three different career levels: Lead/Manager, Director, and Vice President. There are new skills and habits that you need to learn in order to be effective at each of them. As you progress professionally it is important to be able to teach these skills, and to teach people to teach these skills. That is subtle but important.
In addition to teaching your direct reports, it is also important to provide the right amount of teaching and mentoring to your indirect reports too. This is tricky because you want to give enough space for your managers and directors to be effective as well as making an impact on multiple levels of the organization.
It is a good idea to get to know as many of your indirect reports as you can. There is this notion of the Dunbar Number that is worth knowing here—the suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. If you have a high Dunbar Number, it certainly helps you to maintain the right amount of contact with everyone in your organization. The real question is: How many of them should you be mentoring and advising in addition to your own direct reports?
The correct answer is not zero and it is not one hundred percent. If you are mentoring and advising one hundred percent of your organization, you have too much time on your hands or your organization is too small.
Over the years I have concluded that there are three groups of indirect employees you should be investing time in understanding: Your top performers, your struggling performers, and the named successors for your direct reports.
Having a named successor is important. I try to identify the most likely person on every team I run to replace me if I get struck by space debris. I also encourage managers to identify their successor too. Investing time in training and mentoring your organizer’s named successors is a great tool for helping to grow your team and to retain them. I highly recommend it. Whether or not you explicitly tell the named successor that they are a named successor is entirely up to the manager in question. Some people take it well and use it as a learning tool, while other people might wield it as a cudgel on the rest of the team. If you see the latter activity happening, you definitely know that you have some work ahead of you to address that issue. I like to make sure I am spending enough time with named successors for the organization to help give them visibility into problems they will encounter at the next level, and to build a communication channel for them to ask questions and give feedback.
Investing time in mentoring your top performers is also very important. This is an excellent retention tool for your team’s best people, and it is one of those intangible benefits that they will need to balance against “shiny new title” or “three new flavors of sparkling water!” with a BATNA (BATNA is an acronym for “Google it”) at NewCo. I have also found that building relationships with star performers at one company has led to some great lifelong friendships, and I have been blessed to work with them again at other companies!
Finally, it is important to develop relationships with your struggling performers. Managing the bottom of your team and trying to lift them up is hard. It is also very important. Sometimes their direct managers might not have the experience or vision to figure out how to unlock their potential. By investing time in understanding the team members who need the most help to be successful, you might find that they have team fit or skillset issues that prevent them from doing their best work. It is worth investigating how you can help these folks serve the organization better, and as the manager-of-managers you might have more ability to move them elsewhere to see if you can find a more suitable role.
In summary I heartily recommend finding the right level of interaction for you and your indirect reports. For your organization’s best performers and future leaders, having your indirect managers investing time is a great way to accelerate their success and make sure they are really engaged with their work and current team.
Thank you again for reading! I still do not have a sponsorship from Raid Shadow Legends, nor an endorsement from 5 Hour Energy Drink. I will keep trying to get those endorsements. At a bare minimum, if you have derived no value from this article, or any of the deranged scribblings on this site, allow me to encourage you to purchase this Amazon Affiliate Linked Book to help you understand your part in all of this.
