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Facilitate Developmental Relationships

RESEARCH INDICATES that individuals in organizations with formal or informal mentors are more successful in their leadership careers and in maneuvering organizational obstacles and barriers with greater ease than those without relationships of this kind. Linkage Inc. (a firm that specializes in leadership development) found that exposure to senior executives can serve as a wonderful learning experience for those in an organization.²³ Bottom line: Leadership is about relationships. Relationships can open doors and opportunities that will benefit you and your team.

Whether formal or informal systems exist within your organization, plugging your team members into the organizational network can aid in their development and potentially open doors for your department. How are developmental relationships used in your department? How could such relationships benefit those with whom you work? More specifically, how do you get people excited about the significance of developmental relationships and how do you help them do something concrete about them? Here’s what we have learned from our organizational clients.

One operational vice president established the most rudimentary of systems that yielded sophisticated results. Here’s what she did. Instead of setting up the development system for her direct reports, she simply established the context for this and let the group members go whichever way they believed would benefit them. She gathered the group and shared some of the research about the importance of these developmental relationships. Second, she shared the experiences she has had in her own career about how important these relationships were for her professionally. Third, she told the group members to do whatever they wanted with this information (including doing nothing). The results? The group members embraced this concept and did some preliminary reading on the power of relationship building to enhance their own development. They shared these readings with each other. Next, they took the following actions:

1. They brainstormed a list of those leaders within the organization who were both successful and key relationship-builders;

2. Each group member then contacted one of these individuals and requested a meeting during which they would be interviewed about their views on what made them successful and, if both agreed, the leader would consider being a potential informal mentor.

Another example is a customer service manager who had gone through a formal 360-degree process in which he received anonymous quantitative and qualitative feedback on his effectiveness as a leader. This was followed by a one-hour developmental session with a leadership coach. This manager found some insights about what he needed to do to enhance his career and validation confirming what he was already doing. However, the process ended there because there were only enough funds to pay for the 360-degree assessment and one hour with the developmental coach.

The leader then took the initiative and looked for a mentor in his organization whom he perceived was gifted at what he needed to improve—delegation. Not just delegation in a generic sense, but someone who was talented at delegating truly important, meaningful work to others. He found such a person and asked her to coach him in this area (to which she agreed). Three things happened:

1. The manager discovered that he actually learned from this process and became much better at delegating important work to his team.

2. The coach learned so much from this process that she offered to be a coach to others in the organization.

3. The manager himself became a coach to others in the organization.

In a nutshell, leadership begets leadership and relationship building can expand exponentially in organizations.