In the latest in a series of columns dedicated to mentoring, we look at learning with contextual intelligence. This issue: shaping leadership effectiveness and organisational performance
LIS MERRICK
Leaders can use mentoring to develop their adaptive capacity through contextual intelligence
Is your organisation operating in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world? One of the most important predictors of successful organisational performance in such a world is the ability to navigate through the chaos by developing the capacity to constantly adapt and learn. Organisations that encourage creative, continuous learning and flexible thinking survive and thrive.
So how do you create this capacity?s your organisation operating in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world? One of the most important predictors of successful organisational performance in such a world is the ability to navigate through the chaos by developing the capacity to constantly adapt and learn. Organisations that encourage creative, continuous learning and flexible thinking survive and thrive.
Contextual intelligence is an awareness of the interactions and movement between different agents (people, ideas, values, experiences, cultures, alliances, etc), which informs behaviour in a socially complex world.
The contextual intelligence model helps leaders focus on principles of tacit knowledge, synchronicity and time orientation: all of which can be developed easily through mentoring. But how do mentors and mentees understand and use it? We can break it down as follows:
1. Tacit knowledge
This is knowledge that people possess without realising how significant it is. It can only be passed on through close interaction and shared understanding and trust. Mentoring is the perfect way to transmit it.
Tacit knowledge comes from trial-and-error experiences, and decisions are made based on the outcomes. When that experience doesn’t exist, the mentor can support the mentee in comparing similarities in different situations and recognising trends. Having an experienced mentor to create the reflective space to develop informed analogical inference (where new insights are generated in one area, but gleaned from another and thus knowledge developed) is hugely beneficial.
Leaders must develop the ability to facilitate their own wisdom from vicarious experiences using such analogical reasoning.
Mentors and mentees need to understand these processes if the mentoring is to be effective, particularly when supporting leadership growth or managing change.
2. Synchronicity
Synchronicity is two or more unrelated events happening at the same time leading to a connection. It is not for the mentor to make the connection. Rather, the mentor uses the challenge as well as listening skills to support that fresh insight in the mentee’s context.
3. Time orientation
Time orientation is the frame of mind that a leader holds towards the past, present and future. A successful leader embraces all of it: hindsight, foresight and insight.
‘Time warping’ is where the mentor can ‘manipulate’ past and future experiences by making them seem more recent – or distant.
A Solution-Focused approach can help make, for example, successful outcomes seem closer.
Familiarity with mentoring techniques to review the past, plus ‘Time chunking’, helps the mentee be aware of creating a future with a higher priority on one chunk of time, eg, these are my goals in the next three months.
Spending a few minutes on contextual intelligence in both mentor and mentee briefings and building on this in supervision, will not only develop effective mentoring outcomes for those involved, but will also help create an adaptive leadership paradigm in any VUCA environment.
Next issue: The darker side of mentoring. The not-so-pleasant outcomes that sometimes occur in even the best designed mentoring.