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Hone your management skills
through mentoring
UPS, the delivery company, is running
an advertisement right now to say how great its community service
program is. The ad talks about how assisting people and communicating
with people who are different than you helps you to understand yourself,
and in turn, be a better manager.
Good for UPS. I'm a big believer in community service.
Probably we all are. It's just that you have to be a really big
believer to do it on your own time.
As a behemoth Fortune 500 company, UPS can afford
to send a key manager to the boondocks and pay him his cushy corporate
salary to teach coal miners to read or whatever he is doing. If
you work at UPS, get yourself into that program because it is true
that you will learn about yourself, and you will manage more effectively
because you will understand the diversity of what people want and
how to help them get there.
Most of us, though, do not work at UPS. But I have
good news: iMentor provides similar benefits to UPS's program, and
you don't need a Fortune 500 company backing your goodwill.
This program pairs employed people with underprivileged
students. Most of the communication with the students takes place
via e-mail, although you do meet your student in person a few times
during the year, so mentors can operate from their office desk during
the workday. And the program lasts a year, so it's not like you're
signing your life away.
To be a mentor you have to answer questions, such
as, "What is your definition of child abuse?" and you
have to have references vouch for your sanity. Then you wait for
your protégée to send an e-mail.
Mine came one day when I was sifting through my inbox,
deleting porn. I read an e-mail that began, "I am 5'9'', I
wear my hair tied up, and I'm single."* I hit delete. Then
I realized that the return address was from iMentor. So I fished
the e-mail out of my garbage and started mentoring.
My protégée writes one-sentence e-mails,
but she writes about family members who were killed, disappearing
parents and lost boyfriends. Sometimes I wonder how I could do anything
for this kid via e-mail, but iMentor assures us mentors that at
the end of each program, the mentors think they accomplished nothing,
and the students think the program was amazing.
The program coordinator reminds us, "Some of
these kids have never sent e-mail to an adult. They have never had
discussions with an adult outside of their family and school."
My iMentor communiqués are not management oriented
per se, but it is clear that I am learning to be a more patient,
open-minded and empathetic communicator, and the process has required
very little time from someone like me, who is always looking to
e-mail for a distraction from work anyway.
Right now, iMentor
is operating in the New York City area. So if you live near there,
I recommend that you sign up. If you think you don't have time,
remember that reading can take you only so far in the climb up the
management ladder.
And UPS believes so strongly in the power of community
service that they are willing to pay for their most promising executives
to go do it. Treat yourself like a most-promising executive and
try out a program like iMentor.
*Identifying facts are disguised.
-- Posted: Dec. 2, 2002
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