021 Jim Faber: Mentoring

Career Tips & Trends with Tom McDonough & Deborah Burkholder

10/03/12 • 42 min

Internet radio for savvy professionals –
doing work you love, work that matters.

Our guest today is Jim Faber. We asked Jim to talk about what a mentor is, and not only how to find one but how to be one.

Jim has developed an appreciation for the value of effective mentoring in his senior management roles at companies such as Thermo Electron, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Fisons Instruments and earlier in his career at Bausch & Lomb where he has been responsible for effective employee development and mentoring, management of customer loyalty improvement, and complaint management creating growth, and organizational excellence to capitalize on market opportunities.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

From the show

A mentor is a person with knowledge of a particular topic and is willing to share it and willing to help others learn the same topic or learn how to do something or learn how to interact with people not necessarily telling them how to do it but convincing them that there are ways to do it and help them do it.

Teaching is part of it but a mentor is a much more close personal relationship. I used to call it free advice. When you are mentoring someone you can say “look this is the way you are doing it but there is another way and this is the way you might consider doing it and this would be the outcome,” and if the mentoree likes that, then that is fine but if they don’t then they can discuss it back and forth. A portion of it is teaching, yes, it is a two way dialog in mentoring.

If there isn’t a bond between the mentor and mentoree, then it just will not work. There has to be a trust there.

My mentors have always been people whom I have had good chemistry with, and in some cases they would have been my superiors and in other cases they have been peers and in other cases they were levels above me who saw potential in me. There has to be a chemistry.

In today’s business world and environment to build that relationship and stay connected is imperative.

Absolutely, as a matter of fact the most ideal job for me would be to enter an organization that has a lot of great people that want to be successful, and helping them be successful. I am a very big fan of Good to Great. Good to Great is really mentoring. You get a bus and put the people on the bus but getting them in the right seats if they aren’t in the right ones is very important and mentoring is the key to moving people successfully to another seat or getting them off the bus. If you mentor someone to try to do their job better and make the most of the position they are in and they can’t do it right, this is found out very quickly.

Most of my superiors, with one exception, have been my mentors.

Mentoring is the cheapest, easiest and most socially acceptable way of getting people in the right jobs. It is certainly less stressful on people to get them to fulfill a job requirement that is much easier and much more rewarding.

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

Resources

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10/03/12 • 42 min