Life for the corporate elite is not as lonely as it used to be. Now CEOs have an abundance of mentoring options open to them. From In the Black September 2005.
There is plenty of company at the top – if you know where to look. The old cliché of it being lonely in the corporate citadel no longer holds true, and CEOs are turning to mentors, coaches and peer groups for support.
Somewhere between ‘mention’ and ‘menu’ in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, the noun ‘mentor’ is defined as ‘experienced and trusted adviser’. The definition mentions that its origins are in Homer’s Odyssey. In short, when Odysseus sailed against Troy, Mentor was left as the trusted adviser of his son Telemachus. Neither Brad Pitt nor Eric Bana are mentioned at all.
At the top end of the mentoring scale is Merryck & Co. Established in London eight years ago, the idea behind the company was to
create the McKinsey of mentoring.
Anthony Howard, CEO of Merryck in Sydney, thinks half the CEOs in Australia have a mentor of some sort, although most would be informal, with support coming from retired CEOs, informal peer networks, or simply good friends.
‘The past couple of years have seen a move towards mentoring,’ Howard says. ‘It’s come on the back of growth in staff support
services, staff development and coaching.
‘There is also a recognition among organisations that the MBA and advanced study have their place, but aren’t really doing it for people in the front line of business. What is really doing it is the trusted adviser,’ he says. ‘Mentoring is having a more senior person who has been in your role before and can help you understand.’
When Diana Ryall was the managing director of computer company Apple in Australia, she experimented with having a mentor in the form of an executive coach. ‘The difference between a coach and a mentor is a discussion in itself,’ she says.
Although her coach did not have senior management experience, Ryall found her tremendously helpful. ‘[She was] exceptionally powerful in challenging me to think about where I was at and what I was trying to do,’ Ryall says. ‘I would say she was a coach, not a mentor. I found that very valuable to just have a sounding board for the whole time I was managing director of Apple in Australia.’
And so the seed of the idea for Xplore – a mentoring program aimed at 25–35 year old women – was born.
Ryall says that in the first three to four years of a corporate career, most of the big companies provide graduate programs or an organised set of professional courses. ‘When they’ve been there three to five years, all of a sudden that’s inclined to stop and whole lot of different questions come up that are not readily covered by a training course,’ Ryall says.
‘They are more readily covered by people having the opportunity to talk about the issues and how they might handle them differently.’
Typically, the Xplore program involves groups of 10–12 people working around a round table, meeting for 2.5 hours once a month over six months. Ryall found there was also a demand for mentoring from the guest speakers at the events, who tended to be more than 35 years of age and experienced business professionals.
The problem for CEOs is there is little that can prepare a first-timer for the role.
Karen Matthews, chief executive of cosmetics company Ella Baché, had never run a company before taking the role in 1999. After a year she thought it would be useful to get some input from some more senior and experienced CEOs. She turned to The Executive Connection (TEC), which combines peer and mentor support.
‘There are a lot of things you have to do as a CEO where you don’t necessarily have the benefit of getting input from your team,’ she explains. ‘So it’s good to have the TEC guys as a sounding board. It’s great to have them sharing experiences, and most of them have been through everything that you have been through a couple of times.’
TEC, which was founded in the US in 1957 and arrived in Australia in 1986, has some 800 CEO members locally.
The members are split between 72 groups of about 16 members. Each group is headed by a chair who also acts as a personal mentor to each member and is available for a few hours a month. Each group meets once a month and typically 80 per cent – 12 people – show up.
John Egan, who is chair of Matthews’ group, says that mentoring is becoming more popular, as shown by TEC’s growth over the past five years. ‘This whole issue of isolation and having people to talk to is probably the biggest reason why they join the organisation,’ he says.
TEC’s membership profile is CEOs from medium-sized companies. More than half own their own businesses and the balance are professional managers. Ages range from late 20s to early 60s.
The forum and group dynamic of the monthly meeting is devised to allow the free flow of information. Confidentiality is one of the most important factors. ‘It is one of the foundations on which everything is based,’ Egan says. ‘You can’t expect people to be open if that’s not the case. People are bound by rules of confidentiality in exactly the same way as people in public companies.’
Groups are selected for diversity and to ensure there are no inter-company, industry or supplier conflicts. Industries represented in Matthews’ group include financial planning, textiles, sales, hotels, shipping, automotive parts, construction and publishing.
Matthews benefits because her peers will tell her the truth, unlike employees who will tell her what they think she wants to hear. This is something that she found confronting at first but is one of the great benefits of the group.
‘It’s support, it’s confidentiality, it’s a safe environment,’ she says of the group’s benefits. ‘It’s a sharing of stories, it’s a sharing of issues and experiences and it gives you a lot more confidence in the decisions you are making every day.’
In Egan she has someone who takes the emotion out of issues and can put the seemingly insurmountable in perspective.
TEC costs $3900 a quarter. Merryck & Co costs about three times as much, offers a personal mentor available around the clock and tends not to disclose clients, said to be some of Australia’s top 300 companies.
The Merryck method begins with the CEO and the mentor taking a two-day executive retreat to nail down the key issues. ‘We want to know what is it like to sit in your seat,’ says Merryck’s Howard. ‘What are you thinking about? What are your issues? What are your challenges?’
Howard’s method is to scratch below the surface and identify what drives the person. ‘This is one of the reasons mentoring is coming to the fore,’ he says. ‘The recognition [is] that programs are more directed at skills and technical ability and those sorts of things. Mentoring is more directed at the person.’
Objectives are set across profit, performance and personal development. Howard says for some people the mentor might help with what direction their life and career are taking – and the sort of personal questions executives in their mid-40s might ask themselves.
Others might be looking at cross-cultural work and expansion into Asia, or how to hone their leadership skills.
The program also includes membership of the Global Alumni network, which includes an annual three-day symposium, two one-day peer group meetings plus a big event. For example, in May next year Merryck is holding a two-day symposium in London led by management guru Professor Gary Hamel.
Many of Howard’s clients are in their first CEO role.
‘When they get there it is nothing like they expected,’ he says. ‘They find that no one’s going to talk to them … they find that the job they used to do is done by other people now.’
Ella Baché’s Matthews has the last word on mentoring: ‘Its pretty powerful sort of stuff,’ she says, ‘that really ensures that they make better decisions.’