Angels and benefactors are people who believe in you, who watch out for you and have your best interests at heart.
When you have friends higher up the org chart, you are wrapped in a cloak of invincibility. You are more resistant to the daily fray in your department. When you present your ideas, people listen more closely and are more likely to believe you have the potential to say something valuable. When there is a fight or a dispute involving you, you are more likely to come out on top, because your friends rise quickly to your defense, and your enemies may think twice before going after you.
Having a benefactor starts with your boss. When your boss has your back, you get the benefit of the doubt from people up and down the food chain. Having the full faith and credit of your boss is a great foundation for your reputation. But the real trump card is to have real friends two and three clicks, or more, up the org chart.
However, knowing someone distantly up the chain of command may not serve your needs. Calling them in to sort out some small matter on your level will be seen as a waste of their time. Having friends at the top, when you’re near the bottom, is like having a nuclear bomb—sure, you have it, but you can’t really use it. A really big gun should be brought in only in the most dire of circumstances. Otherwise the benefit of angels and benefactors comes from access to information, advice, and counsel.
The word “mentor” was inspired by Mentor, the trusted friend of Odysseus who was placed in charge of Odysseus’s son’s upbringing during his long absence while he went off to fight the Trojan War. The son, Telemachos, was visited by Athena who often disguised herself to appear to him as Mentor, offering sage advice and strategies to survive the intrigues surrounding him. So advice from a mentor has the tradition of being divinely inspired.
There is no word “mentee,” although you see this back-formation everywhere; the proper word is “protégé.” Although a mentor can be assigned by a third party, which fits the origins of the word, the best mentors are not assigned. The best mentor-protégé relationships grow up spontaneously, by mutual agreement of the two involved.
A mentor can smooth a young person’s passage into and upward within an organization. Mentors can help orient a new person to the culture, practices, and mores of an organization and explain the unwritten rules that exist outside the employee manual. They can run interference for the inexperienced young person, solving problems he may encounter with personalities, codified rules, or business practices of all sorts. And most important, they can mention your name when new assignments come up.
A young person with several mentors in an organization is practically bulletproof. Not only can they bail you out of trouble, if you use them correctly, but they’ll keep you from getting into trouble in the first place by offering good advice. If you have several lifelines to call when you don’t know the right answer, a wise and knowledgeable advisor can help you get it right the first time.
Why would a mentor volunteer to assist a younger person when they don’t have to do so? The reason is simple: The mentor likes the protégé! So it’s important to be likeable. Protégés should also try to do favors for their mentors, because being useful creates a bond. In other cultures, protégés give gifts to their mentors, but in the United States or Canada, gifts of any significant value can appear to be bribes and so are not appropriate.
A word of caution as you develop mentor relationships: try to avoid using the word “mentor” at all. Call your friend a friend, an advisor, a connection you have higher up the food chain, an angel or benefactor, a person you can call on when you have certain types of questions about company practices, anything but the word “mentor.” Some mentors are tired of the whole concept, because many organizations have overused the mentor-protégé relationship to try to improve onboarding and transfer of organizational culture. People who are regularly tapped to be mentors may be fatigued by assigned mentor-protégé relationships, and they may recoil at the thought of yet another protégé, especially if the last turned out to be a disappointment. Or they may still resent the prior ambitious clod who called constantly with trivial queries.
The following are the hallmarks of a good, structured mentoring program:
Mentors are assigned by the organization; every incoming employee gets an assignment. No one is left out.
Mentors are outside of the protégé’s reporting chain, allowing more honest advice and counsel and reducing micromeddling. For example, mentors should be in the same division but in a different department from protégés, or in the same function but in different locations.
Time for mentors and protégés to interact is structured into their schedules. There is an explicit minimum level of interaction.
Mentors are either volunteers, who view mentoring and teaching as intrinsically rewarding activities, or directly compensated for mentoring, or both.
There is a formal process in place for a protégé to switch from one mentor to another, without recriminations for either.
Mentoring is factored into the review and advancement processes. If it is valued by the organization, mentors are rewarded for it.
My father had a favorite saying: “If you want to sit at home and watch television, nobody is going to complain about you. But if you’re going to do something in this world, someone’s not going to like it.” Highly successful people always generate some resentment, some friction within an organization. How is it best to diffuse or channel that resentment—by being charming and winning people into your favor or by channeling that resentment into the power you have over them?
In his famous treatise, Il Principe, the sixteenth-century Italian political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli analyzed the politics of power and decided that it is better to be feared than to be loved (for a prince, at least). He believed that leaders who are loved might get cooperation while times were good, but they could not count on compliance when times got rough. So being feared was a better control mechanism and thus a better choice for a leader who needed control. But does this type of control really matter in today’s organizations? Should you be feared or loved?
When an org chart is flat, as most are today, any one person’s power over another is diluted. This even applies to direct reports. If you have twenty direct reports, you’re going to be much less involved in their daily lives than if you have three. And you need your workers. If you fire someone, you have to replace her, which can be expensive, time consuming, and risky.
By the way, you do have to fire someone occasionally as a leader and not just to get rid of bad people. Firing someone once in a while is an excellent way to keep subordinates interested in their jobs. But if you fire a lot of people, or fire people who are basically fulfilling their mission, you will have to spend a lot of your time on staffing rather than on the real work of your business unit.
People who are truly fulfilling their missions are not going to be afraid of being fired by you because they know you can’t fire them because you can’t afford to. So your biggest mechanism for creating fear is weakened. And today, employees have more power over their bosses than ever before. Once you reach a certain level, you can’t get promoted without a 360° review. If your people hate you, they will be sure to nix your advancement, even if that means they have to continue to put up with you. Only landlords give good references for bad people.
When people fear you, they only do their work in response to that fear. Your method of control actually creates a need for that control. If they won’t do anything without your direction, you’re going to need to provide a lot of direction.
Douglas McGregor, an early business psychologist, codified this in his famous X and Y theory of management, presented in his landmark 1960 management book, The Human Side of Enterprise. X theory managers believe that people will not work without direct supervision and that people don’t like to work anyway. Therefore an authoritarian management style, a militaristic command-and-control approach is the best way to get them to do work. Y theory managers believe that people work for their own internal reasons and that a manager’s job is to foster and nurture that internal motivation and guide it to the enterprise’s benefit. Thus a participative management style, one that allows information flows and power to go in all directions, is the best way to get them to do work.
Managers who believe in Y theory are more successful in knowledge organizations and in the flat org charts we all live with today. It is probably not very effective to order people to be creative or to demand that workers contribute good ideas. Y theory, with its collaborative and participatory management style, is not about being feared. Thus it would seem that it is best to be loved. But is it? When you are truly beloved, no one wants to see you go. They want to keep you close to them because they love you. You are the light of the department. If you were to leave, it would be the opposite of a cause for celebration; it would be a tragedy.
So being loved has a downside. If you’re deeply integrated into your business unit, if you’re embedded in it, if you’re part of the source code, then you cannot be extracted without a high cost. Everybody has gone to going-away parties that were more like a wake than a celebration. If you’re going to be deeply and truly missed, you may have waited too long to get promoted. You are perhaps too identified with the business unit you are leaving.
Because it is neither good to be feared nor beloved, the best management style is to be well liked.
Well-liked people get mentioned for promotion without excessive emotionality. Well-liked people are appreciated but not clung to, and being liked has the association of being well known and well respected.
It’s a good idea to cultivate a little bit of a “just visiting” image. Let it be known that you are here to make some major contributions, but you should keep your boss on notice that you are not a lifer. You are going to do a great job while you’re here, and you are going to be ready to hand that job off gracefully. The person who comes in behind you will be well set up to perform, because you know you will be leaving and you have put into place measures for a smooth transition.
Observations of a P.R. Account Executive
Recently I went to dinner in Baltimore with the account team for a sports drink. They had hired me to give a speech on career success to a trade group, and we were going to celebrate the fact that the talk had been well received. There were about fifteen of us at dinner, including a young woman who stood out noticeably from the rest. Her own boss deferred to her. Her own boss said she was lucky to have her services, while she could still afford her. The young woman was charming and funny, warm, the opposite of arrogant. She was obviously going places and maybe had one foot out the door already. And she was the epitome of well liked. Her compatriots knew that she was not going to be around long, and they liked her anyway, because she was hypercompetent, she did her job well, and she made their jobs easier at the same time. She had deflected any resentment that she might have engendered by being both socially adept and valuable to everyone on her team. That’s the hallmark of a fast-track performer.
Guardian angels and benefactors aren’t the only sources of power and effectiveness to be cultivated. Business friends, in general, can help you. Business friends may be found in other departments, other branches, and even other companies or industries. In short, they can be above, below, beside, or nearby you, and they needn’t have positional power, either. Everybody knows the secretary or techie who can work magic; they have no positional authority, but they have huge value in helping you get your work done.
Having a wide network of business friends can help you find information and solve problems. Your friend in engineering can tell you whether a feature is feasible—while you’re still in the client’s office. Your friend in finance can tell if your division is slated for increased investment and happy times—or RIFS and divestiture. Your friend in another company can warn you about financial problems that threaten a customer’s creditworthiness—alerting you to the need to change your terms with that account.
One huge rule about business friends, however, is this: You have to make friends before you need them. When you make friends only because of what they can do for you, you become known as a user. You have to be a friend to have a friend. You have to be useful, entertaining, charming, and supportive to have friends who are useful, entertaining, charming, and supportive.
This is akin to the rule of all politics: Doing favors for people is like money in the bank. You can call it in when you need it, but you have to do the favors first.
Engineering is different from general management. For example, I make more decisions about whom to promote than almost any other kind of manager. We assemble project teams, and they each need a team leader, so in effect, that’s elevating one person out of many, promoting them to be in charge. Engineers have to get used to competing for slots, and engineering managers have to get used to selecting people to be in charge.
The first thing I look for is technical knowledge. Engineers have a hard time working for someone who doesn’t know as much as they do. If you pick someone who is really good from a business standpoint, you also have to be sure about the fundamentals.
For example, if the guys on the team ask the lead about tech specs, and the leader can’t share useful information, then there’s a problem. They do a lot of this in groups—they share knowledge and information—and when the leader can’t deliver, if they don’t know as much as the team working under them, that’s bad. Techies have a hard time working for anyone who doesn’t know the technology or the product.
Next I look for client skill. Everyone has clients, even if they are internal. So, you’ve got to have a leader who can interact with the customer. We lost a major contract before I came here, millions and millions of dollars to design a new control system for an aircraft, because some idiot built a team without a communicator. We ended up subbing for someone else on the same project, because we really did have the technology they needed, but we didn’t win the contract.
I try not to promote someone who lacks basic engineering skill, and I try not to promote someone who can’t tell me how they’re going to solve the client problem. If you stink as a client guy, that’s ok, but you better be ready to tell me how you’re going to make that work out. Either tell me who you’re going to bring with you to handle the problem, or tell me how you’re going to improve. I love engineers who go to Toastmasters. That tells me a lot about a guy.
Here’s how I pick engineers to be promoted: I call them into a room, one by one, and ask them to assess the skills and strengths of their colleagues. What does this tell me? If people hate you, it’s going to come out. And if people hate you, you can’t lead them. Second, I get a clear idea of everyone’s level of expertise. In effect, I get the team to pick its own leader, but I have a heavy hand in the process. I tell them my decision, but it came from them.
Sometimes promotions don’t work out. There’s no guarantee. And you have to be on top of things when that happens. You have to pull that guy out, or woman, whatever the case may be. That’s always a disruption, but you have to do it and do it fast. Put them somewhere else, without destroying them. You can’t lose good people, even if you make a mistake about an assignment. So even if you give someone a promotion, you have to be able to take it back, too. The best way to do that is blame a reorg, or tell them you are restructuring the work flow. Give them a chance to save face. Don’t belittle them. You never know. Next year they might be able to handle a leadership role.
Here’s my advice to young engineers trying to get ahead. It’s a lot like getting an engineering job in the first place. You want to put it out there that you’re going to give them the best return for their money, of anybody on the team that might be picked. You’d be surprised how many people don’t consider that their boss is the one who’s got the jobs and got the money, the one paying the bills, and they need to approach that boss like a company approaches a customer. ROI. Why you’re the one who will maximize the outcome.
Oh, and there are the little things that add up to a reputation. Showing that you’re looking out for the company, you believe in the company. You’d be surprised how many guys are always bad-mouthing the company. If you’re with a company that you need to criticize, you need to get the hell out and go somewhere else. You want to show that you like the company, that you want to make it a better company, that you work for a company you can brag about. If you go to work every day with that kind of attitude, it shows.
And if you’re one of these guys who wants to get promoted, people up the line need to know who you are. You need to get noticed. Just after I started here, I heard the president of the company was going to be in our facility. I made it a point to go up to him and shake his hand, and I wasn’t going to miss a chance to do that. Later on he sent a nasty memo to my group, telling us how we had screwed up. I wrote him right back, reminding him that we had met and telling him how he was just flat-out wrong. And he was. I figured I wouldn’t have a job by sundown the next day, but that was just the beginning of a relationship that has been gold for me.
He saved my butt several times. I survived several waves of layoffs. When we got new managers who came in and wanted to clean house and put in their own people, he’d send down an email, “No, you’re not going to get rid of him.” I’ve outlasted them all, and now I’m in charge. Know people up the ladder, and make sure they know you, too.