I often get asked for advice on how to find a mentor. This guest post by Rene D. Petrin provides a nice 8-step approach:

Back in December, Dan talked about "10 Big Development Goals for Leaders in 2012." Goal #7 in the blog post stated: “Find a mentor and/or hire a coach.” While a formal mentoring relationship – meaning one that takes place in a monitored program within an organization – is the ideal, sometimes an informal mentoring relationship is what’s available. The question is how do you go about making it happen?

Here are eight steps to follow:

Step #1:Identify one or two specific leadership skills you feel that you could improve through mentoring. Is it your ability to make strategic decisions in a quick and decisive manner? Is it your ability to recognize and develop talent to improve the success of your department and yourself? Something else?

Step #2:Now assess what style of leadership is best suited to you. (As you know, not everyone leads in the same way.) Are you more collaborative as a leader, working through consensus? Or are you a decisive type of leader who makes the decisions and motivates others to follow those decisions?

Step #3:Determine whether you want a mentor who mirrors your leadership style so that you can improve upon how you lead…or decide if finding a mentor with a different leadership style might challenge you more and help you grow as a leader by adding new dimensions to your own personal style.

Step #4:Consider the type ofpersonyou want as a mentor. For informal mentoring to work, you have to have focus. The first three steps have provided you with this focus. But the other important component needed is the relationship aspect. Think about the personal qualities and/or communication styles that you respond to. Do you want a mentor who is more sociable than business-like? Or one who is more of a thinker than a doer? Perhaps you respond better to warmth and friendliness rather than someone who is more aloof, despite his or her success.

Step #5:Now make a list of potential leaders who you may want to approach as mentors. These people could be in your company, but they could also be elsewhere, such as an alumni organization or networking group. Don’t forget to ask colleagues for recommendations as well.An important point:this may be obvious, but it's worth saying: only put leaders with proven track records on your list.

Step #6:Approach and interview the candidates. Have a conversation with at least three of the leaders on your list to evaluate if the person would be the right fit for you. Approaching potential mentors and eventually asking "the winner" to be your mentor are the hardest steps in the process. Remember, it'showyou approach the person that makes all the difference. Here's one strategy for doing just that:

• Make contact via phone or email introducing yourself and indicating that you are working on self-improvement in the area of leadership and that you would welcome input from an experienced leader who has been successful in this area. Would this person have 30 minutes or so to have a discussion with you on your goals and how best to approach these? Maybe you could do this over lunch, as you would also like to thank that person for his or her time.

• If you feel the person might indeed be a good fit, ask him or her (at the end of the meeting) if you could stay in touch with any follow-up questions. The person's response – and HOW he or she responds – will be a good indicator as to whether your assessment is on target. Does the person sound welcoming and enthusiastic about staying in touch? Or does the person sound noncommittal?

• Send a handwritten thank you note. In a pinch, an email will do, but nothing beats a personal note of thanks. (Note: you should still send a thank you, even if you've ruled the person out as mentor.)

Step #7:Decide and ask. After interviewing several candidates, you are now ready to ask the person you think is best if he or she will be your informal mentor. Before you do this, it’s important for you to be prepared to specifically state what you're looking for and how you want the relationship to work. Since you’ve already had one or more conversations, your prospect has an idea of what you're seeking, but now be clear and as specific as possible. In addition, you should be prepared to discuss setting some guidelines for your mentoring relationship. Here are some to consider:

• How often will you meet? Weekly is ideal, and once a month is the recommended minimum.

• Will your meetings take place face-to-face, over the phone, through Skype, or combination of these?

• How will you approach confidential issues?

• How will you communicate to one another if something isn’t working in the relationship?

• How long do you want to meet before you re-assess the need to continue or end the relationship? Note: in formal mentoring programs, the relationship typically lasts nine months to one year. We suggest a minimum of four to six months for an informal relationship.

• Discuss concerns you both have about engaging in this type of relationship.

Step #8:When your chosen mentor has agreed to the informal mentoring relationship, then congratulate yourself for finding someone who will be strategically important to your career and to your growth as a leader. To succeed, make sure you keep to the guidelines you’ve agreed to in Step # 7.

Here's to your leadership success in 2012!

Rene Petrin is the founder and president ofManagement Mentors, a company that has been designing and implementing business mentoring programs since 1989. You can connect with him onLinkedInandFacebook.

As a follow-up to the recent post and comments "Are You Managing or Just Nagging?", here's everything you need to facilitate a robust dialog on performance management, with lots of room for grey areas.


A. Simple model:



B. Supporting material for each quadrant:

1. Managing:How to Discuss an Employee Performance Problem

2. Nagging:Are You Managing or Just Nagging?

3. Vacation:10 Reasons to go on a Vacation

4. Avoiding:The Cowardly Manager’s Guide to Dealing with Poor Performers

Just made it up over the weekend - what do you think? Make sense? What's missing, what would you change? Could it make me rich and famous likeKen Blanchard orMarshall Goldsmith (humble credit to both for influencing my thinking on this model)?

Feel free to use, modify, etc... just give me some credit, but only if it works well. (-:

2/1/2012 update:

Some of the early feedback on this model suggests it needs some clarification. Let’s try a brief description of each quadrant, and see if that helps. We’ll start at the upper right quadrant and work our way around:

1. Managing.
This is where a manager is taking appropriate action on legitimate performance problems. That is, there is something the employee is doing or not doing that is having a significant impact on results. Or, in the case of a behavioral or values issue, it’s having a significant impact on the results on others, company reputation, etc….
The postHow to Discuss an Employee Performance Problemdescribes how to have this kind of discussion in a productive way, not punitive way.

2. Avoiding.
This is where a manager SHOULD be taking action on something the employee is doing or not doing, but because of a lack of courage, skill, awareness, or whatever, is not doing anything about it.
The postThe Cowardly Manager’s Guide to Dealing with Poor Performersdescribes in a tongue-in-cheek way the perils of this lack ofavoidingaddressing a performance issue head-on.

3. Vacation.
This is where a manager’s team is just humming along, with NO performance problems, so there’s no need to take action. It’s probably because the manager has done such a good job in hiring, communicating performance goals and expectations, being a role model, giving regular feedback and coaching, and developing employees. Or, it could be just dumb luck. (-:
Either way, the manager is able to take a well-deserved vacation, and the post10 Reasons to go on a Vacationdescribes why it’s important for a manager (or anyone) to take vacation.

4. Nagging.
This is where a manager is riding herd on an employee for some little thing that really doesn’t matter. While the issue may be a personal pet peeve for the manager, there’s no clear connection to the employee’s performance. The postAre You Managing or Just Nagging?attempts to distinguish between performance problems, works habits, and pet peeves.

Here's a guest post from entrepreneur Duncan Murtagh,"an Irishman living in Taiwan, who has been to New Hampshire several times":

How can we move past the tough times of 2011 to a more profitable2012?Well we could start by coming up with some new ideas to drive revenue growth. In this article I’ll demonstrate 3 different techniques that 3 very different businesses could use, and may have used, to think up new business ideas.

1. The S.C.A.M.P.E.R. checklist of questionsis a powerful tool for looking at your existing product/service lines and coming up with new variations. Probably the best way to explain the technique is by working through an example. Let’s imagine you are a family owned‘fast-casual’restaurant in a small city facing big competition from national chains such as Panera Bread. What new product or service could you offer to fight back against your deep pocketed competitors?

S = Substitute- Fast Casual restaurants focus mainly on food, less so on drinks and desserts. What if you substituted desserts for food, and ran a fast casual, high quality desserts restaurant?

C = Combine- Could you combine the delivery option of a fast-food restaurant with your own restaurant’s quality food, to create an affordable, quality-food delivery service?

A = Adapt– How about adapting the successful drive-through services that the fast food companies offer to the fast-casual market? Fast-casual food generally takes longer to prepare, so perhaps it could be a phone-in the order 1st, pick-up at the booth system.

M = Magnify– magnify one aspect. Fast casual restaurants usually use higher quality ingredients, could you go a step further and go organic? Or vegetarian or even vegan?

P = Put to Other Uses– use the restaurant as a market research center. Consumers get a free food item for every survey or test they take. The more expensive the item, the longer the survey.

E = Eliminate (or Minify)– The classic Seinfeld episode, “The Soup Nazi”, centers around a passionate soup seller, who sells the ‘best soups in New York’ along with a couple of other items, in a super-efficient manor. Could you copy this tactic and focus laser-like on one main product? Serve the best pasta in the city? The best burritos, and only burritos?

R = Reverse (or Rearrange)– Purchase and consumption of the food normally takes place on the same day right? What if you rearranged this a little so that diners pay in advance, perhaps weekly or monthly for 5,10,15 meals, with a large discount?

2. ‘False Faces’is a thinking technique that works by reversing the conventional assumptions. The classic example is Henry Ford’s decision to bring the carto the workers, via a production line, rather than having the workersgo to the car. Let’s jump forward 90 or so years though and look at a more recent example to explain the technique.

False Faces Step 1– write down the conventional assumptions. If we roll back the clocks to 1998, when Reed Hastings first dreamed upNetflix, we can easily imagine the serial entrepreneur writing out the conventional assumptions about the DVD rental business at that time:

● Renters will travel to a central location where DVDs are stored -renters willcome to the DVDs.
● If DVDs are returned late, the renter will be hit by late fees, as the DVD store misses out on potential rental revenue.
● Most of the rental revenue will come from a narrow range of hit movies.

False Faces Step 2– reverse the assumptions: After listing your assumptions, you should now challenge them by reversing them and writing down the opposite of each one. Let’s flip over the assumptions just mentioned and see what happens:

● DVDs willcome to the renter, either by mail or via their internet connection.
● No late fees, as a business model where the renter must replace each returned DVD benefits from tardy returns.
● Rental revenue will come from a vast range of movies such as… minor hits, documentaries, classics, kids movies. This will appeal to both early adopters (who can spread the word) and customers not being served by current DVD rental businesses.

See what happened there? By reversing the conventional assumptions, a radically different business model has emerged which happens to be the one Netflix has deployed to great success. What could you discover if you reversed the assumptions around your business?

3.‘Incubation’is more than just ‘sleeping on it’.Everyone has heard the old cliché ‘let me sleep on it’ but you might not know why this works and the best way to apply this technique. Let’s look at a personal example to illustrate how to use the technique - How I used incubation to come up a name for myonline suggestion boxcompany – ‘Vetter’.

Step 1- Jot down some rough details of what kind of product/service (in my case a name for my business) you are trying to come up with. Here’s what I wrote, about 6 months back:“Something short and snappy, easy to spell and ideally a real word. Should communicate the removal of bad ideas – e.g. ‘sift’.”

Step 2- gather information about the challenge. In my case I read articles about naming a company and looked at some competitors names, to make sure I picked something that stood out.

Step 3 - Instruct your brain to find a solution, let go of the problem and forget about it for a while. Go exercise, sleep, socialize, work on other things.

Step 4 -Rejoice when a solution arrives! In my case the solution was the name “Vetter”. As you can probably figure out, the word means a person or thing that ‘vets’ something and sounds a bit like ‘better’. It’s also short and snappy” so it ticked all the boxes. As an interesting side-note, the idea arrived while in the shower, in keeping with thewise wordsof an un-named physicist who many years ago said: “We often talk about the three B’s, the Bus, the Bath, and the Bed. That is where the great discoveries are made in our science.”

I use these techniques several times a month and have tackled all kinds of problems with them. What are your favorite techniques for coming up with new business ideas? Please post them in the comments.

Duncan Murtagh is fascinated by the thinking process, creativity and ideas. That’s why he co-founded Vetter, which helps companies get moresuggestion box ideasand break through thefuzzy front end.

Imagesource.