While this article by Lisa Jasper on Insperity’s blog is focused on tips for coaching and mentoring future leaders, these tips are certainly applicable to founders of startups.
Her key point is important for any organization: Talent development requires a serious commitment of both time and resources.
Here are the 5 tips she recommends, read her post for details on each tip:
- Identifying leadership
- Begin a conversation
- Develop through experiential learning (most applicable to mature companies)
- Build in both coaching and mentoring
- Don’t forget the soft skills
Lisa makes a distinction between mentoring and coaching:
Mentoring differs from coaching in that it generally occurs over a longer period of time and focuses on developing the individual holistically for the future. Coaching normally focuses on the short-term. Coaching helps an individual overcome a specific, current issue or performance challenge. Used together, mentoring and coaching strengthen and mature future leaders.
Insperity is an HR consulting firm. There are interesting overlaps between the mentoring that goes in inside companies and the mentoring of founders through colleges and university entrepreneurship programs and in incubators and accelerators
Mentorphile 