Direction Autumn 2023 - IoD Scotland members magazine

DIRECTION | TECHNICAL BRIEFING
www.iod.com/scotland
Mentoring: the simple way
to pass on experience
The key business practice of
mentoring has become
integral to mass corporate
culture in this Digital Age. But
is its ultimate purpose being
defeated due to becoming a
wee bit too complex, asks
tech commentator Bill Magee
A LinkedIn post to me from the
esteemed Professor William (Bill)
Buchanan CBE on mentoring got me
thinking. He asks us to think back to our
best teachers who implicitly urged us to
be a great teacher-mentor to others.
The good Prof of Applied
Cryptography at Napier University said
they were likely to be the ones with high
standards, who believed in our potential
and raising our standards to meet theirs.
Personally, my sixth form and English
literature teacher was the late, great
Brian Glover, soon to become a Royal
Shakespeare Company (RCS) thespian
and actor much in demand after his
debut in Ken Loach’s award-winning film
Kes, including Alien 3!
He would regale us with tales of his
Merchant Navy career and part-time
wrestling stints as ‘Leon Arras, the Man
from Paris’, then ask: “Now, what about
this book?”
Subtle yet profound, an approach that
has never left me. Ironically, you may
recall his immortal words on TV’s classic
sitcom Porridge, when he remarks to
fellow inmate Ronnie Barker: “I read a
book once. Green it was.” He was also
‘gaffer’ on the long-running Tetley TV
commercial.
One perceived drawback to the
mentoring process is how it gets, at
times, wrapped up in management
speak buzzwords. Of course,
management speak shouldn’t be
altogether maligned.
A tight-knit team working on a
particular specialist commercial project
will often use abbreviations to explain
and analyse a particular knotty area.
Acting as a timesaver all round, then on
to next business to hand.
However, sometimes things can go a
bit loopy. I recall one time working in the
United States covering a tech conference
- having flown from Edinburgh to that
other windy city, Chicago – when on
attending an ‘entrepreneurial guru’ talk,
specifically aimed at eradicating jargon,
things fell apart.
The speaker spent the first 15 minutes
using jargon to explain how we could get
rid of, er, jargon.
I had to leave the room, obviously to
catch up on my blue sky thinking and
think outside the box while seeking that
low-hanging fruit.
Seriously though...
I spotted a mentoring/leadership/
teaching role advertised on LinkedIn,
when the successful candidate would be
expected to contribute towards
‘delivering authentic brand purpose’ to
ensure ‘on-the-ground impacts’ creating
a ‘win-win’ for all.
I had carried on writing this
commentary but scrolled back: surely the
above is a classic example of artificial
intelligence!? Expect to see a lot more of
this AI gobbledygook as we attempt to
communicate open and freely. If it isn’t
AI, well...
Such verbosity and opaqueness lacks
what my old pal ex-FBI senior agent
Edward Gibson describes as the KISS
principle. No stranger to Scottish
business audiences, he elaborated to me
from Washington DC: “As in ‘keep it
simple, stupid’”.
Then there’s renowned author
C.S.Lewis: “Don’t use words too big for
the subject.” This from a writer who
received a First in Honour Moderations
from Oxford University for his prowess in
both Greek and Latin literature.
Or Apple’s Steve Jobs: “Simplify,
Simplify, Simplify” a useful reminder not
to make your business any more
complicated than it has to be (mind you,
did he have to say it three times?).
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos: “Focus on simple,
clear, and concise communication.”
Or Richard Branson: “Complexity is
your enemy. Any fool can make
something complicated. It is hard to
keep things simple.”
Finally, Albert Einstein: “If you can’t
explain it simply, you don’t understand it
well enough.”
Also, why do myths persist
surrounding the process of mentoring?
Forbes highlights five such myths:
being a mentor takes too much time;
mentoring is a one-to-one relationship;
mentors have to be older/more
experienced than the mentee; only
mentees benefit from the relationship;
and the practice is not measurable.
Yet surely it makes sense that having a
mentor in the workplace can actually
reduce work-related stress and anxiety
as knowledge and experience is shared
22 AUTUMN 2023