Mentors often organically emerge from their desire to teach. Period. Yet it’s not about checking boxes of gravitating from “one to the other;” it’s about gravitating towards the love of seeing others grow. The best part: It can be an intentional choice you have in how you apply your role!

What you are building in people are visible in their outcomes. Not their benchmarks and all the achievements everyone thinks matters. How their end-play vibrates through the world right around them. Not reverberating them… how the environment vibrates it’s own spectacular!

Change comes in all forms: Natural, invisible, intentional, responsive, resistive, fad, necessary, unfortunate, developmental… Just to kick it off.

The responses to and realizations of are just as many or more. Sometimes realities seen too late. Your role as a mentor can have one of the greatest impacts on individuals, the world, and time in a more powerful way than you realize. 

Trust is the greatest way to empower others. Leaders are responsible to convey and establish environmental trust; meaning any lack—theirs or between and through anyone—is also on the leader.

Love the energy in this month’s episode! Expectations are both objective and subjective, and it’s amazing how inter-reliant they are on one another, regardless of the underlying motivation. When mentors and leaders practice with an open concept, expectations take a life of their own that allows spectacular creations!

Everybody has equal value, but not everybody has the same kind of value. Sometimes it’s great, but sometimes it seriously isn’t. And it affects more than the individual. Yet great leaders beautifully manage and address both value and value challenges to create outcomes that actually maximizes the entire set of people.

Productivity and burnout have this symbiotic love-hate relationship. Leaders are responsible for the environment their personnel exist in and how this pans out. Even leaders themselves, especially highly driven leaders, can “productivity” their way right to someone else’s burnout.

Original article by Tricia Manning

This was such a fun episode to make! There is vision is so many places, we didn’t even realize the kind of perspectives!

We started with this idea of vision of the mentor and vision of the mentee, looking forward and looking back. But the more homework we did, there much more influential ways to see Vision in mentoring.

I couldn’t decide which quote was the best summary. Listen and share what reaches you!

This week Karl jumps in! It’s an experienced perspective on finding out advice is coming from the wrong person. Really listening, not “imaging what we think they’re saying,” may actually be a moment to realize where others are, and pose great opportunity.

The most vital occupations in the world function off of a framework. Need I say more? On top of that, if we as mentors do not apply a clear, specific framework, it suggests our mentees aren’t vital to us or their paths either.

• I don’t even know where to start
• I just know it, and don’t need to spell it out or write it down
• I am rock solid—written, framed, followed

Accountability has zero value unless it is acted upon. And even taking action gives it only half its value. So what makes it whole? Is it even necessary?

As a leader or mentor, executing the rest of it is the difference that fills it out for what you see in the greatest leaders and mentors.

Since we get such a limited time to spend with you, Karl and I decided this year to focus in a very detailed fashion on an area that just keeps jumping out at us from everything we hear from mentors, leaders, and growing professionals alike. In everything leadership and mentorship, there is an underlying question as to just what drives the desire to “give” freely, or even at the cost of oneself. The motives drive the outcomes. That is clear.

This week we look at the big picture and the note that Karl so insightly crafted. Each episode we’ll dig into one specific area for leaders and mentors to grow those that will ultimately drive the machine and grow others.

Applauded by some, cringed by others, the Who of Leadership Accountability has a bit of a split. There indeed are accountability partners, which offers that face-to-face challenge. Where the grandest accountability falls and how strong the right to call is the game changer of deep leadership.

Accountability can be easy in some aspects, but in others quite a foggy area to navigate. Leaders who brightly own accountability are trusted and have teams that step up to the plate for everyone. When we give some semblance of a framework for accountability, those leaders can navigate in those moments of fog. Not always easy to step to, but it is simple:

Vulnerability

Willing to Listen to Drawbacks

Letting Go

Little bit of an excuse for bragging on my kids maybe, but truly, this reignited a lesson on what it takes to help others build. It is a potent reminder to me of what builders of people must instill to get people where they want to go. And it’s not the goal that’s the target.

Thanks for the reminder, son!