Current Thinking Column
Aspen Family Business Group
Over the past year, I’ve had numerous conversations with family business owners and advisors about their efforts, and associated challenges, to transferring knowledge between generations. Most recently this included a discussion session during the Aspen Family Business Group workshop, Building and Sustaining Legacy of Oíkos, in Thessaloniki, Greece. In many of these conversations, family owners and advisors spoke directly about their efforts to institute mentoring programs to address needs for talent development, succession planning, and learning between generations. As the birthplace of the word mentor, I found Greece to be a particularly evocative location to dive into the topic of these learning relationships.
While there certainly are people who have a natural proclivity for being a highly effective mentor, more often, they are the ‘exception’ rather than the ‘rule.’ In most cases, effective mentoring relationships and programs require thoughtful planning and execution. This starts with building a shared understanding of mentoring followed by the development and implementation of a program that follows established best-practices. This said, in most cases, I found that advisors and family owners often relied on informal approaches to mentoring and were frustrated that they were not getting the results they had hoped for. In the world of mentoring, these factors commonly go hand-in-hand.
In this month’s Current Thinking Column, I want to start what I hope to be an ongoing series about knowledge management in family business. In this edition, my intention is to help readers deepen their understanding of mentoring as a concept and tool that can be very useful in family owned businesses. As a starting point, I will provide you with a brief overview of the history of mentoring followed by discussion about building a shared understanding of mentoring and the difference between a supportive family member and a mentor.
In Part 1 of this series by Donnel Nunes you will learn about:
- History of Mentoring
- Seven Key Points
- Building a Shared Understanding of Mentoring
- Four Important Action Items
