Clive Simpkins

Mentoring for 702-landers

Mentoring ain’t for everyone!

We often hear young women say, ‘I’ll never say that to my children!’ And then one day, to their horror, they exclaim, ‘I sound just like my mother!’ Logic says that we give what we have got. But mentors have to rise above this platitude and not give just what they have.

Rather, they must act as a catalyst in a chemical reaction and process that creates something special and sustainable in those whom they mentor. It takes a gift to be a mentor. It is also a gift to be one.

So, do you have what it takes?

The concept of mentorship is not new. In the East in particular, the process of learning at the feet of an expert in her or his craft has long been around. A friend of mine went to study Zen design in the pottery studio of internationally acclaimed Master craftsman Shoji Hamada. He got to sweep the studio floor for nearly three years. He also learned in that time to become very observant, humble and skilled at remembering things. Because the Japanese tradition was that he should learn by observation and experience – not from someone else’s theory.

The worst mentors will be perfectionistic, utterly linear, anal, control freaks. If you’re like that, do the mental health of the planet a favour and don’t sign up to be anyone’s mentor – because you don’t yet understand yourself.

The celebrated and brilliant Professor Howard Gardner (pic above) of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education has postulated 9 forms of intelligence. This means that contrary to expectations, your protégé, charge or acolyte may not necessarily think the same way you do. Or process information or concepts the way you do - or even like you! (Nice double meaning).

They may arrive at the same conclusions that you do, but via an utterly dissimilar process. It’s only if we’re able to celebrate diversity and understand that there’s almost never only ‘one solution’ that we can become good mentors.

Most critical of all: We need to be respectful to those we mentor - mindful of their style, pace, quirks and uniqueness. And we need to be utterly intolerant of laziness, self-indulgence or any hint of wanting or expecting an ‘easy ride’. Scorn mediocrity at all costs!

You’ll be an ideal mentor if…

1.       You feel you have something in the way of knowledge or skills that you’d like to share with others.

2.       You actually do have some knowledge or skills worth sharing!

3.       You treat confidential issues better than a priest in a confessional.

4.       You have your ego sufficiently under control so as to notice when it does start to kick in.

5.       You have good emotional intelligence (self-understanding).

6.       You’re a good listener.

7.       You’re capable of concisely and clearly explaining concepts.

8.       You don’t have a driving need for appreciation, accolades, approval or thanks and you’ve given up worrying about who gets the ‘credit’ for good ideas or processes.

9.       You’re patient when someone’s genuinely giving it their best shot.

10.    You’re aware that the same task can often be accomplished in a variety of ways. You’re cool with the idea that it doesn’t necessarily have to be only your way!

11.    You’ll be prepared to have your protégé joined at your hip (other than in the bathroom!) for the process and duration.

12.    You’re capable of loving people in a platonic way. (You’ll need to love them to forgive them for what they may say or do to you, or make you say!)

13.    You can be tough without doing guilt. You’ll know that experience and struggle grow the best dendrites. So you won’t spoon-feed or over-protect. If short-term suffering will produce the best result, you’ll watch from the wings with your psychological first-aid kit at hand.

14.    You have good intuition and emotional resilience.

15.    Think you’ve got some of what it takes? Then let’s see you sign up and pass on something of value to humankind.

If you've been kind enough to read this far - please excuse the truly awful layout of this posting. TypePad (the supporting program for this Blog) and I aren't friends right now! It seems to specialise in messing with my spacing!

A mind is a fire to be kindled, not a vessel to be filled.

Plutarch (45-125AD), essayist.

Mentoring at its best

For

Listeners to Talk Radio 702

The Jenny Crwys-Williams Show 29th May 2006

A daunting challenge facing South Africa at present is the creation of employment. This requires people with either qualifications or capability to be drawn into the economically active sector. Most important of all, it requires a commitment from as many skilled South Africans as possible, to mentor other people without expectation of a return. How do you develop people capable of eclectic, creative, visionary and usable thinking?

The first challenge is that qualifications are not the same as capability. A certificate or university degree will theoretically testify to someone’s ability to think at a certain level. The following story has nothing whatsoever to do with ethnicity but everything to do with mindset, and it’s a valuable real-life example: Kwame, the highly personable, formally well-educated young black man in Donald Trump’s ‘The Apprentice’ TV series, was pipped at the post by a seat-of-the-pants entrepreneurial young white man who could make up the script as he went along. Even though Kwame was American-educated, he typified a certain element in South African business today. He was described by Trump’s insightful female marketing guru as a ‘text book man.’ There can be no greater curse.

If it was between the pages of a marketing manual, or in a Harvard Business Review article, or in an MBA case-study or syndicate discussion, then it will be applied almost to the letter. But the ability to round-trip that information, compare it to a host of other scenarios and come up with a creative leap that can be applied to a fluid or volatile marketing demand, is another kind of ability altogether. It’s a talent which develops with rare exceptions, only from being joined at the hip of a genuine mentor.

Not all mentors are genuine. I have experience of some in South Africa’s multinationals who claim employment equity (EE) commitment. They’re hellishly good talkers, but backstage, are racists of note. Their stock modus operandi is to ‘set up’ young black executives in their company, and then systematically erode their status and self-esteem through a series of subtle but denigrating ‘failure’ experiences. At the end of which the pseudo-mentor probably sits back and says, “See, I told you ‘they’ wouldn’t be up to it.”

This isn’t a theoretical scenario. The HR director of one of these companies had a literal tantrum in his office when I accused his executive of complicity and culpability in this conspiracy-to-fail. In paraphrased Shakespearean terms I fear he protested too much. There were other creepies in their woodwork too. Like dictating to staff how they would complete certain assessment forms so the company would garner specific awards - nauseating and disgracefully dishonest. But they make a killing, in literal and metaphoric terms whilst their black talent revolving door spins apace.

Anglo American quietly understood the process many years back. They created the position of ‘executive assistant.’ You were joined at the hip with one of the luminaries in the organization. Perfectly implemented, such a mentoring becomes (excluding lala-time as we say in Zulu) a 24x7 exercise.

Not only should that young person be with you every business minute – regardless of the confidentiality of the situation, they should go with you to clients, be there when you negotiate, be there when you assist a staffer in crisis, be there when you hire or fire someone. They should go to business luncheons, be taught the finer points of globally acceptable business and social etiquette, be exposed to the vagaries of cultural differences. They should go to the theatre and movies with you. They should learn to play golf or squash or some other ‘networking’ orientated sport. They should be sponsored to join a country club so they get to understand how an old-boys or girls network operates. They should be made to read voraciously outside of their specific career interest so they become interesting conversationalists. They need to travel, to see and experience how the proverbial ‘other half’ lives.

The genuine mentor is she or he who will allow the one being mentored to suffer if necessary if that’s the quick route to the learning. People never truly learn from just theory and intellectual input. They learn experientially. Teach them to be utterly and completely honest. Explain the simple distinction between diplomacy and truth. If you’re in the office and the person says ‘She’s away at a conference today’ that’s a blatant lie. The simple and truthful answer is, ‘She’s unfortunately not available at present. May I take a message?’ Got it? There are no white lies. They’re lies. If you wish to mentor well, leave behind a legacy in which your protégé is committed passionately to a moral and ethical path personally and professionally. You will contribute not only to your company and the community but to the planet.

A final thought for the one being mentored: Please don’t compete with your mentor. If they’re genuine they’re seeking to have you grow beyond where they are. Appropriate humility and receptivity are essential prerequisites, if you’re to benefit.

Manto's Malignant Legacy

South Africa has without doubt, become a nanny state. The Brits believe the UK falls into the same category. But some of our government ‘initiatives’ (serendipitous oxymoron) are having the effect of putting people out of business and accelerating the flight of intellectual capital from the country. I haven’t heard those two particular accusations being laid at the door of number 10 Downing Street. But then we are unique in many respects.

At the end of this month, my friendly family pharmacist leaves South Africa. For many years he ran a small, efficient, innovative, courteous and utterly service-orientated business. His staff complement which included his charming wife was about a half dozen in total. Being an owner-pharmacist business, it enjoyed an ethos of caring, sincerity and integrity-based customer care and the ‘added mile’ service ethic, so desperately sought by large retailers, was the norm in his business.

The National Minister of Health, Dr. Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, has implemented non-negotiable legislation throughout the pharmaceutical industry – ostensibly designed to bring affordable healthcare to all South Africans. A laudable objective had it been considered and implemented with greater circumspection. The effect of single exit pricing from pharmaceutical manufacturers and a ministerially-mandated fixed dispensing fee has had a dreadful impact on most small pharmacies. They aren’t geared size-wise to operating a high volume low profit margin business. Often located in shopping centres or retail malls, they pay the same (usually exorbitant) going rate per square metre as other tenants, but are hobbled by governmental interference in terms of the service and dispensing mark-up they can charge. An interesting economic model if ever there was one: in which you bear the costs and risk of running the business, but the state defines your modus operandi and therefore effectively, your financial viability.

But back to my friendly pharmacist. I feel as awful about him going away as if I were losing a family member to emigration – which is precisely what’s happening. He was aggressively recruited by American head hunters many months ago. Invited to a get-together of similarly endangered pharmacists in a leading Johannesburg hotel, he was offered an ‘out’ that seems like a utopian lifeline. However he doesn’t particularly want to live in America and nor does his small family. But the choices are not great: give up your pharmacy profession and re-invent yourself or go somewhere where your skills can be applied, they will be appreciated and where the state will keep its meddlesome fingers out of your business.

As bad as the loss of my pharmacist, is the loss of his pharmacy itself. Nobody wants to go into small retail pharmacy any longer unless it’s part of a large chain because of the uncertainty and predictably poor viability. So he can’t sell his business on. It closes at month-end. No doubt the large American-style chain drugstore located elsewhere in the same complex is jumping up and down with glee. But they won’t be getting my business. I’ll have to get scripts re-issued and I’ll then take them to one of the rapidly diminishing small pharmacies left in my neighbourhood.

I suppose the minister will finally wake up when there’s a full-blown crisis. Like the deputy president Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka has just done with regard to the paucity of skills availability in South Africa. Now ain’t that a no-brainer for you? Government is cooking up a recipe which is long-term, going to have major negative consequences for many sectors. One only needs to look at the functionally irreparable state of our Keystone Cops department of home affairs that can’t even keep adequate passport book paper in stock. That’s just a rather public symptom of similar examples of staggering ineptitude in many ministries. Largely I believe because there was too abrupt a clean sweep from the civil service of white Afrikaners who were capable of doing a good job. I’d have waited for skills transfer to take place before easing ’em out of the system if that had to be done at all.

Cartels or price collusion have always been anathema to the spirit of competition and free enterprise. Government has in place a plethora of mechanisms to prevent the private sector from engaging in such disadvantageous-to-the-consumer practices. And yet, through its own nanny-state meddling, it’s effectively created precisely such a scenario in the pharmaceutical industry. And in the process sent many small businesses and their owners down the tubes – or out of the country. Maybe the deputy Prez and the Minister of health should find time to take tea together? It could just be in the national interest.

Related Tags: Business failure, Emigration, Pharmacy, Retail

Apartheid was a winner!

Attention-seeking headline - or fact? It may be shocking but I believe it’s true. One avowed intention was the suppression or destruction of black South African culture. It succeeded. Even President Mbeki, recently addressing the National House of Traditional Leaders, appears to agree.

I’ve been writing about it for years and having abuse heaped on my head as a result, for the same period. My statement has been: Ubuntu is dead. That much-vaunted African Humanism, which nurtured gems like: ‘No African child will be an orphan so long as one African woman lives.’ Or: ‘It takes a village to raise a child.’ ‘I am a person only because you are a person’ etc. etc.

Both the late Dr. Kalushi Drake Koka (the revered Ntate Koka) and Jon Qwelane of Talk Radio 702 fame could and did give riveting accounts of ancestral wisdom and custom in South African black cultures. I sat in awe listening to how successfully criminal rehabilitation (as just one example) was dealt with according to tradition and custom. Having experienced the hospitality and generosity of incredibly poor black people in Kliptown when I was a missionary preacher there in the 1960s, I saw it in operation with my own eyes.

Last year I lost a significant contract from an African entity because I wrote that:

1) Black AIDS orphans were being ostracised by their neighbours – who by the way know bloody well that they can’t get AIDS by casual association.

2) That baby rapes and child abuse in African society are at a proven all-time high.

3) That other than in selected rural areas where a smidgen of custom stills clings tenuously to life, you will no longer, by and large, experience much community sharing, empathy, care-giving or support.

Those attributes have been subsumed to the new IMM cultural phenomenon. I, Me and Mine. And it’s not just young people who are guilty. Many age groups have climbed on the band wagon as the maxim ‘every man for himself and God for us all’ has kicked into big-time play.

Of course people will protest, the race card will be played and my credentials or audacity to write or comment on such issues will be attacked. But in recent media, President Mbeki himself is finally acknowledging that Ubuntu ain’t wot it used to be, or what it ought to be. On the very same page of 5^th May, as the Star newspaper article featuring the Prez’s comments to this effect is a picture of Mbhazima Shilowa, our Gauteng Premier. Dressed in clashing but clearly expensive designer duds, the former communist trade union leader is smiling broadly at having just launched an own-blend wine. Let’s not use Mr. Shilowa as the solitary example but rather as the metaphor for a particular new South African leadership mind-set.

Journalist Len Maseko in his Sowetan newspaper article commenting on the launch had this to say: ‘At R250 a bottle, the premier and his friends are looking beyond the marginalised masses for their target market. They have forgone their liberation sensibilities while embracing their new wealthy lifestyles.’

There are way too may former ‘struggle’ heroes and adherents who these days seem to perpetuate the struggle only insofar as further feathering their already very comfy nests is concerned. It’s as though any cultural imperative to alleviate, ameliorate or eliminate the suffering of in particular, women and children in our country is no longer their obligation or responsibility.

The hypocrisy for me is this: If you were indeed struggling for egalitarianism and the ‘liberation’ of your own people – where has that fine ideal gone? Where is the concept of ‘I am my brother’s keeper’? Where is the ethic of ensuring that what little there is will be shared with everyone? Even if it does mean that all involved remain a little hungry as a result of the process.

I am left saddened that Ubuntu’s demise now has even the Presidential seal of recognition on it. Further, does it mean that the ‘Ubuntu’ we saw in the 60s and onwards was in fact nothing more that a bonding together of similarly afflicted people? That it was a collusion of convenience? And now that the common enemy has been vanquished, the underlying amoral, self-serving behavioural patterns have simply assumed their appropriate priority?

The old architects of Apartheid must be chuckling in their graves. Their system did what thousands of years of natural evolution might not have done. It killed cultures and turned a people back into a financially and materially predatorial species – prepared to ignore the needs of their own poor and weak.

Am I celebrating the success of Apartheid in cultural destruction? No. I’m instead mourning the lack of leadership that has allowed it to run its full course. That is not a happy prognosis for the future of South Africa.

Additional thoughts, added 20th May 2006. This is Ubuntu?

1) In South Africa, black people invented 'necklacing' - hanging a car tyre filled with petrol around the neck of someone and lighting it - horribly burning them to death in the process.

2) In the current security guard strike in South Africa, we have people being stripped naked and flung from moving trains - to certain death or dreadful mutilation.

3) We have an on-going litany of politicians and government officials creaming off money intended in some cases for school feeding schemes in desperately disadvantaged rural areas.

4) There is an epidemic of HIV + males raping babies or young virgins in the distorted misconception that in so doing they will rid themselves of the virus.

Update 14th June 2006:

A South African Human Rights Commission (HRC) report released yesterday, a result of public hearings by the Commission across the country, tells of school pupils being forced to have sex with teachers as a 'disciplinary' measure when arriving late for school or even, in some cases, for food. Economically disadvantaged students were at particular risk.