Love It When They Leave

I believe a quality of a great leader is the ability to place the focus on your team members by mentoring and letting them go.  As a corporate leader, I had team members that were looking to expand their skillset, so they could be prepared for more senior roles.  I would meet with these team members to devise specific plans on how to expand their skillset based upon their personal and career aspirations. 

A part of these specific plans consisted of involving them in most aspects of my daily activities.  We did this in a way that would allow them to maintain their current responsibilities, yet get some experience of a more senior role.  How did we do this?  Here is a sample of how we carried this out:

Expectations:  We started with a conversation on expectations and set-up some ground rules.  Some of the items we agreed upon were that their current responsibilies would take priority, their workweek would expand up to 10%, confidentiality of sensitive information would be required, they can choose to stop at any time, questions are encouraged, all questions will be answered, and none of their colleagues information would be accessible.

Discuss:  I provided my official job description to these team members for review, and then explained the realities of the role that I play within the company.  We had discussions around this for them to understand the role on a high level, the expectations that the role entails, and some of the politics involved in the process.  These were honest discussions.

Action:  These team members were invited to sit-in on various company and/or client meetings, review and provide input on documentation that I was responsible for generating, review company and/or client documents, ask questions to gain clarity, and provide suggestions. 

The overall mentoring process proved to be a great success and team members were very happy to be involved.  I also encouraged my team members who had direct reports to provide a similar mentoring model. 

The biggest compliment that I received was a resignation letter from a team member that was part of the mentoring process due to a promotion or accepting a more senior position elsewhere.  I was genuinely happy for these team members and gladly let them go to pursue their dreams and achieve their goals.  I still keep in touch with many of these folks today.