That phone call from
Istanbul, “Fortunate has won!” will not be forgotten very soon.A journey which
started late in December last year culminated in a young colleague, Fortunate
Mboweni, winning the 2014 Young Freight Forwarder of the Year competition which
is organised by the International Federation of Freight Forwarders Associations
(FIATA). Fortunate is the first Africa
born African to have won this competition since its inception in 1999. What an
amazing experience to have been her mentor through the process.
This will change
Fortunate’s life forever. For those like me who are given the opportunity to
partner with our future leaders there were valuable lessons- in some ways I
learnt more than Fortunate.
As these are lessons
which may benefit others I would like to share them.
1.
The end is
the key.
Fortunate and I spent a great deal of wasted effort by misinterpreting
the requirements of the competition. Thanks to another member of the team’s
more careful scrutiny of the competition criteria we were able to focus our
efforts on what was really needed.
It is also vital to know what your respective roles are. It was a huge temptation
for me to over participate and carry out work which Fortunate needed to do, in
which case Fortunate would have learnt very little except to sit still, look
and listen.
2.
Be
brutally frank.
The whole objective of mentoring is to have your protégé succeed beyond
their wildest expectations, but not yours. In taking on a mentorship take great
care to understand the clay with which you are going to work.
If you are not 100% confident of your candidate’s capabilities, don’t
start the project. On the other hand do realise that, when the goal ahead is
very clear and very worthwhile, people do outperform themselves.
It is up to the mentor to carefully assess the potential of the person to
be taken on the journey. Mentoring is leading for success, not setting up for
failure.
3.
One of youse
ain’t gonna make it!
At different stages of our journey Fortunate or I became extremely
disheartened: there was too much to do in the time available, material we
needed was not forthcoming, material we did obtain could not be digestively
packaged within the constraints of the completion criteria, our presentation
concept was brilliant but it just wouldn’t work and so on. What kept us going
was the ability of the one who was standing to pick up the one who had fallen.
In a mentoring journey obstacles are inevitable: each will affect each
partner differently and it is up to each to counter the effects of each setback
on the other.
4.
There are
no rules.
Mentoring is very much like parenting: there may be guiding principles
but generally the rules have to be made up as you go along.
People change with time and mentorship is all about development. As
development takes place so the protégé needs to be taking on more
responsibilities whilst the hand of the mentor grows lighter and lighter.
As Fortunate’s mentor I knew I had done my job when she left for
Istanbul fully equipped to win the competition.
5.
It’s the
team which succeeds
Vital to successful mentorship is the opening of doors by forming a
support group around the protégé. The mentor doesn’t necessarily have all the
answers but does need a very wide network of contacts who collectively do.
As Fortunate so eloquently put it when she thanked everyone “A key part
of the presentation I made in winning the competition was to point out that
much of my success was attributable to the team which supported me, and that
means YOU. My winning was truly a joint effort in which I acted as your
spokesperson in articulating all the knowledge and experience you had poured
into my poor little head during my journey through the competition!”
6.
The
rewards far outweigh the pain
In general I estimate that every hour of a presentation takes 10 hours
of preparation. In Fortunate’s case the 15 minute presentation she made to win
the competition took not less than 100 hours. This just gives some idea of the
level of commitment needed to be a mentor for a project of this nature. One
thing is for sure though: the rewards from this experience will stay with me
forever- every second spent on this project was worth it.
It may be true that legislation
and other Government interventions may assist in transforming our society into
one in which the limitations on each individual’s success are only the
self-imposed ones.
I would like to
suggest that a more important element to a nation’s success is that those who have gained a measure of experience
and expertise take proactive steps in using those assets to invest in society’s
future – our young people.
