Thoughts on Mentors

I struggled a little writing this piece because in some ways it may sound disrespectful. It's not meant to be; it's just what it is.
I can't say I know any natural born mentors, which leaves me to believe that mentors are made, not born. I myself, would not make much of a mentor. I really don't have the patience for it, although I'm sure some clever individual could extract mentoring from me. Personally, I had a fantastic mentor, but it was work. It's not like he came up to me and said come on - let me mentor you. Far from that. I selected my mentor and when it came for the selection process, there was only one clear choice for me, the best in the business. I wanted the best in the grocery business, only later did I discover that his knowledge would encompass all retailing, and to some degree all businesses. That's who I wanted and that's who I trained to become my mentor. I found the secret by mistake one day. My mentor was never really much of a conversationalist, unless you were talking to him about business. I discovered this sometime after I began working for him. I was trying to maintain a conversation with him at his lake home one weekend and discovered that talking business made for rare, easy conversation. Once I knew that was the only thing he really actually loved to talk about, I knew I could build a mentor. Of course I loved talking business as well, so it worked.

As time went by I began to acquire most of the knowledge I needed and began using that knowledge applied to various situations to develop some new tricks of my own. I was gathering information and new techniques from wherever I could whenever I could. As I began to introduce these techniques to my subordinates in an effort to further improve operations my mentor would, at times, let me know I had gone too far. My real problem was that I had not gone far enough. I had found a program developed by Tom Winninger called "Selling in the Supermarket". As a store manager, I had trained my employees using this program and felt that it had be very helpful in improving sales and customer relations. When I was promoted to Operations Manager and given the assignment of training all 500 employees, I used this program as the center piece. One of the key points in this program was asking "open probe" questions, and that extended to answering the telephone. All 500 employees were taught to answer the telephone with an open probe question - "how can I help you?" As it turned out my mentor did not like this telephone greeting so one day he told me he wanted me to have our employees stop answering the phone that way. This of course, was very upsetting to me. I had spend a lot of time and money teaching all 500 employees to ask open probe questions and that training alone had produced some significant sales increases for the company. I tried explaining why they were taught to answer the phone that way and how significant it was to our overall training, but it didn't matter. He wanted it stopped. I had to buy some time to regroup and prepare my sales pitch so I got him to put the matter on hold until he returned from the vacation he was about to take. While he was gone I contemplated the matter and worked on what exactly I was going to say to him when he returned, I was sweating it out though; it wasn't going to be easy. When he returned I had planned to schedule a meeting with him to discuss the topic, but when I called him he wasn't interested. It seems that while he was on vacation the resort he stayed at had been trained to ask open probe questions and in fact he was running into it everywhere he went. I was allowed to continue my training and the employees continued to answer the phone with "how can I help you". One of the greatest things in the world is having a mentor - don't make the mistake of thinking it's going to be easy. My mentor was/is my Father.