LEADERSHIP STRATEGY: MENTORING
knowing when to let go
As a parent, I know the agony of watching children leave the nest unprepared—an opinion they did not share at the time. There are many pitfalls and traps along life’s way and I wanted to protect them from serious mistakes. They wanted to leave before I felt they were ready and I tried to hang on long after they’d already gone. There comes a time in mentoring relationships at home or at work, when you should no longer be trying to exert control.
Compare your protege to an arrow…you sharpen their point, aim towards a target, and play a role in their intitial thrust, but once you let go of the bow string, they’re on their own. The most effective safety net you can provide during the mentoring phase is a set of core values and exposure to good examples of the values being lived successfully .
Even the best tutelage will fail in some cases and the “arrow” will engage in potentially destructive behavior. A well tested support process called “tough love” is designed to help when all else has failed.
Tough love means affording people the dignity of choosing their own way—even when you believe their chosen path to be wrong. Some people will learn only from personal experience. The most difficult part of tough love is allowing a protoge to bear the full weight of consequence when their elected actions go wrong.
A “let go and let God” mindset will help you muster the courage to follow the tough love process and hold your ground once the going gets tough—as it surely will. To make this mindset work, the first thing you need to know about God is, “you ain’t him.” Avoid the natural urge to protect and control.
Long term benefit seldom occurs from interfering in the life choices of others. Meddling often induces the opposite to your intended effect—it can encourage a struggling person to continue dysfunctional behaviors long after they would have stopped, had they been left to their own devices.
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