The View From Down Here

It is not often that senior executives get sat firmly on the seat of our pants…left slightly dazed, and get our egos checked.

You walk into a meeting where your designation and the company you work for mean nothing.

The experience is not the most comfortable I can assure you, but it is one that I would heartily recommend.

Welcome to the cold, real world of mentoring a charity.

My own particular ‘seat of the pants’ moment did not come, as you might expect, in the midst of a delicate sales negotiation or staring down the length of a polished wooden table in a soaring CBD boardroom.

 Instead it came, with clockwork regularity, for 2 hours every month in a small office in Ang Mo Kio as I took part in perhaps the most challenging, certainly the most humbling and arguably the most beneficial experience I’ve ever had: being a mentor for local charity, Talent Trust.

 The Talent Trust concept is a great one: know-all executives (like me) come ‘down to earth’ for two hours every other month and use their business skills to help and advise local charities.

Each group of 4-5 carefully selected mentors brings a range of experience to the table and the whole thing is facilitated and managed by one of Talent Trust’s brilliant Project Managers.

 Giving 5 ‘type-As’ sharpies and letting them loose on the CEO of a charity sounds like the worst idea ever. Instead, it works brilliantly as the Project Managers provide guidance and remind us that there are more important things to listen to than the sound of our own voices.

 Over the course of twelve monthly meetings the group meets with their chosen charity, listens to the problems that the charity is encountering or the goals it is trying to achieve and looks to offer advice and potential solutions backed by decades of experience in the ‘business’ world.

 In my case that meant spending a year with children’s charity ‘Child at Street 11’ – a project dedicated to offering education to children from dysfunctional or low-income families. The aim is to get the family out of poverty in one generation , very different from the KPIs I usually have.

 Seat of the pants…meet the floor. You’re not in Kansas anymore.

 In a world where the bottom line means an awful lot more than high fives and a bump to the Q1 bonus I (and I am certain that my fellow mentors felt the same) had a unique experience.

 We all think we’re pretty slick, we all know the angles and thrive in the fast-paced (cue buzzword) ‘start-up’ world of modern business.

 But if you really want to find out what you’ve got, whether you really can think around corners I recommend you taking just a glimpse at the world through the eyes of a charity.

 This is a world in which human emotion and human complexity are the currency. Targets aren’t dictated by volume but by outcome. And nothing…nothing is as easy as you think.

 There is no HR department, no IT department, no Head Office, little support and often no road map to success.

 In short, everything you think you know, you don’t.

 And even the stuff you do know may not be much help.

 So, what do you do? You get humble (and be humbled), you listen and listen…and when you’ve listened… you listen some more.

 And you learn, and you grow. And together you try to sort through the kind of complexity that only charities have to deal with – where every decision has an emotional component and the stakeholders are generally those with little or nothing.

 At the end of the year, somehow, you’ve discovered that actually you do know a thing or two, that you have actually helped and that the charity you’ve worked with and the people they care for do now have a brighter future.

 You discover that you’ve grown as a person, you’ve become more empathetic and learnt things that only the Talent Trust experience could have brought you.

 You may still be a know-all executive to the core but I guarantee you’ll look at it all from a slightly different viewpoint – and the view from here is pretty good.

 To get involved (and I cannot recommend it enough) why not join us at our upcoming Mentor Mixer: 24th October, 6:30pm at the KPMG Clubhouse, 36 Robinson Road. Just drop us an e-mail to let us know you are coming, RSVP to: [email protected].

 Hope to see you there!