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How to Be a Successful Mentor

Mentoring matters when it comes to fostering leadership. Here's how to do it right.

By Kim S. Nash

May 02, 2008 — CIO —

Lance Wilson traces a 17-year history of mentoring in his life, as both a mentor and a mentee. From each one of those relationships, he says, he carries a treasured lesson. One of the most memorable he learned in the 1980s and 1990s, when he was rising in IT at Pillsbury under mentor Carl Wilson (no relation). Carl Wilson, now EVP and CIO of Marriott International, is a member of the CIO Executive Council (CEC) and a judge of the 2008 Ones to Watch awards, a program conducted by CIO and the CEC that honors future IT leaders.

 

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"I remember Carl talking to me about how my career would be determined by my PIE: performance, image and exposure," says Lance Wilson, now CIO at Assurant Health, a Milwaukee insurer. Carl Wilson credits the idea to Pillsbury colleague John Hammitt.

To enhance his management skills, Lance Wilson learned to ask a lot of questions. "The probing kind, not the informational," he says. By doing that—whether you face a customer, vendor, partner or adversary—a CIO learns how to look at himself and his project or idea more objectively. "There's a Greek word, ekstasis, for standing outside yourself. It's very helpful," he says. This also helps polish your image, he adds, and exposes you to other people and points of view.

"I've used this many times to help facilitate understanding of dramatic change, which every CIO has to lead at some point," he says.

"To create strong, well-performing organizations, you have to focus on individuals ," says Hammitt, who was also director of information management at Morton-Thiokol and VP of Information Systems at United Technologies. "Executives have got a responsibility to develop strategy and oversee execution but more importantly, ensure that the team gets stronger every year."

Wilson was lucky to have mentors to guide him: Just 41 percent of CIOs put time into developing the IT talent within their ranks, according to our 2008 "State of the CIO" research. Yet the career trajectories of CIOs who have been mentored illustrate how, when the relationships work, mentoring pays off for the people and for the company. Seventeen of the 20 Ones to Watch honorees this year overwhelmingly rated mentoring and one-to-one coaching as very effective or extremely effective in their personal success; 15 winners also described their CIO as "extremely committed" to their career development.

 

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