The Hindu Business Line : <I>Be a mentor to yourself </I>

One casualty of a highly pressured executive life is any kind of reading or discussion of subjects beyond the needs of the current job. What leisure there is, therefore, is spent in front of the TV set or with friends. Anything that is not strictly job-related takes a backseat. The challenge to senior managers these days, however, is not merely to help people do their present jobs but prepare them for future ones. So, what do future jobs hold? A common element is the unpredictability of change.

One thing everyone is agreed on is that the rate of change in business and its environment has accelerated. Therefore, beyond keeping up with the latest systems and practices (if not innovative concepts) being adopted elsewhere in one's field, one has to develop a wider awareness of what is happening in the wider world. However, continuous learning involves being able to think in the abstract and with analogies. This is important in adapting from practices in a dissimilar industry.

More similar than we think

It is a paradoxical thought that at a deeper and more basic level, many issues across diverse businesses have more in common than we generally like to think. It is hard for some to accept that if you really want a breakthrough in your industry, the chances are you will draw inspiration from someone or some industry way outside your own field, rather than a competitor whose business is likely to be all too similar to yours.

To take a favourite example of mine, where should one look for exemplary customer service that acts as a competitive edge in an industry where every other aspect is common or very similar and there are a huge number of players? It has always occurred to me that banks and airlines (more so the latter) are excellent examples. So, regardless of what line of business yours is, there is always something you can pick up — either in the way they anticipate customer needs, or the way they deal with crises, or handle difficult customers, and so on. Besides abstraction and analogies, the inability to reflect on one's own experience dispassionately is becoming a serious disability. A third serious handicap is the lack of interest in learning anything new for its own sake.

Grab the chance to learn

Everything has to have an obvious utilitarian value. Even when a management programme is offered by the company for professional development, one finds that many executives want to see a certificate or diploma at the end of it. They need an obvious long-term benefit, something they can use on their c.v. when they look for a job next. This is so even where the person is quite happy with the employer and has no immediate intention of a change. This instrumental approach to all further education and training is somewhat similar to schoolchildren, who classify every piece of information as within or outside the limits of the syllabus.

Such a parallel for the mid-career professional is, in my view, quite risky because not everything of real meaning and value comes only from a book or a course. Learning opportunities have to be grabbed with both hands, wherever and whenever they occur — and not always in what one considers the present function or discipline. It is thus essential for manufacturing people to understand costs, accountants to understand sales and marketing, and for marketing people to relate to a cost-benefit way of looking at every managerial decision.

Above all, we as managers must first overcome the inhibitions that make us dismiss them as either "not invented here" or "it doesn't apply to our company, industry or situation". The time has come for every senior manager to both be mentored and be a mentor himself.

S. Ramachander