We live in an “I want it now” world. We often expect instant and perfect results from ourselves and the people we lead.

How often do we see something once or see an expert demonstrate a new skill and we either expect to be able to do it just as well right out of the chute, or we dismiss it as being too hard to learn? Or perhaps we try it once. But it doesn’t feel natural, it takes effort and we feel inept or uncomfortable. I know I hate that feeling.

Let’s say, however, that we’re really determined. This looks like something worth learning. We try it a few more times. But more often than not, we say, “Well that didn’t work!” And then, we never try it again.

News flash: It takes time to gain competence, let alone expertise and mastery. This is where your mentor can provide you with invaluable support, coaching and a realistic perspective on what tangible progress should look like.

When you want to adopt a new practice, or learn something new, tell your mentor what it is and what you intend to accomplish. Research by behavioral psychologists has shown that simply identifying a new practice that can become a positive habit sets you up for success. For even more insurance, set a specific and measurable goal. Work out an action plan and report your results as you go.

Give yourself at least 90 days to reach your goal.

During the first two weeks, check in with your mentor daily to report progress or setbacks when they happen and for support and encouragement. After that, depending on how you are doing, weekly or bi-weekly check-ins should be sufficient.

These steps will help you to be genuinely confident that you will practice your new behavior, despite occasional slips. Psychologists call this self-efficacy. It’s different from general self-confidence; rather it is the specific conviction that you can change the behavior.

Initially, you might find your mentor’s encouragement and your delight in the vision of accomplishment inspiring. But inspiration is short-lived. At best, it will last about a week or two. Henry Ford once said, “…after that, it’s 90 percent hard work.” Inspiration may get us started, but it won’t keep us going. This is where motivation makes the difference.

Motivation

And you can’t just go to the store and buy a case of motivation. According to behavioral psychologists, motivation is a series of small behaviors. Reporting your progress to your mentor and tracking it by recording or charting the behavior in question between meetings will give you a solid framework to stay accountable and in action.

Reward Your Successes

Reinforce yourself for each step with a healthy treat. Mentors, here’s where a specific and inarguable acknowledgement will reinforce your mentee’s confidence and resolve. You and your mentoring partner may want to create a reward contract. You will also want to arrange your environment to help, rather than hinder you – limit exposure to any high-risk situations, create reminders. We don’t need to think of motivation as something we have. Motivations are specific behaviors we build into our day.

My latest behavior change is in making certain that I enter every appointment I make in my smart phone calendar, with enough of a reminder alarm to ensure I keep the appointment and get there on time. For the most art this is easy to do, except when I am very busy or when setting up the appointment takes more than three email exchanges, or the meeting gets re-scheduled. That’s when I can lose track and end up missing an appointment altogether or get there late. Both results are bad for business an extremely embarrassing for me.

The plan, which I put into place on January 6, after missing an appointment, is to enter every meeting or appointment as soon as a date and time is identified. Set the reminder alarm for 2 hours ahead or up to 2 days ahead, depending on how much preparation I need to do for the meeting. Next, I review the upcoming week’s appointments on Sunday. I let my mentor know I have done that via a text message.

It’s been a week and a half, and I found a flaw in the plan. When the reminder pops up on my phone I am also going to text or email the person or people to confirm the meeting. That means I have to set the reminders so there is enough time for people to adjust if they have to. Details are not my forte, so this is a challenge. I am confident, though, that I will be able to make this practice a habit that will allow me to be more productive and happier in my work.

Susan Bender Phelps runs Odyssey Mentoring & Leadership, training and consulting company for organizations that want to thrive and survive the Boomer Brain Drain. Her new e-book, “Aspire Higher” is available at Slimbooks.

According to Inc. writer, Maeghan Ouimet, a recent report found that bad bosses cost the economy $360 billion a year, that’s BILLION, in lost productivity. She adds that, “Terrible managers have a trickle-down effect: They bring down the quality of your employees work and your bottom line with them.

How pervasive is the problem? Well, three out of four employees report that their boss is the worst and most stressful part of their job. And 65% of employees said they’d take a new boss over a pay raise!

In addition to costing you in productivity, this can also cost you your best and brightest. 50% of employees who don’t feel valued plan to look for another job within the next year. Now that the recession seems to be loosening its grip, that timeline will likely speed up.

What’s the answer? Create a learning environment. Teach your leadership to educate employees. Give them the mentorship and leadership skills that will make it possible. These skills include: Listening powerfully, being a keen observer of patterns of behavior and results, asking thinking questions that lead to breakthroughs and giving actionable feedback. My new e-book, “Aspire Higher,” tells compelling true stories of how mentoring boosts engagement, success and career growth.

After all, good bosses are teachers and mentors. In fact, their teaching accounts for 67% of a boss’s effect on employee productivity,” says Katheryn L. Shaw, Stanford University Professor of Economics and author of “The Value of Bosses.”

Click here to read more.

What makes any mentoring program successful, no matter the size of your company, is this: “A mentorship program needs to have a path to leadership or advancement for the mentees.” That’s what I told writer Katie Morell of American Express Open Forum in a recent article.

Here I would add, the path to advancement needs to be just as clear for the mentors as well. Once you have built that into the design, and back it up with tangible results, your program will be highly regarded by your employees. They will compete to be involved.

In the beginning, though, you can follow some simple steps to start things off in the right direction. Read more here.

Recently, I had an a wonderful conversation with Audrey Shah of MO.com. We talked about how I started Odyssey Mentoring & Leadership, my take on the distinction between competent and great leadership and I shared one of the mentoring stories from my upcoming book, “Aspire to Go Higher: Get a Mentor, Be A Mentor,” due out at the end of August.

From the Interview:
“The best leaders should be expected to identify and cultivate leaders and peak performers to keep the organization growing and successful. When I interviewed Sarah Mensah, Chief Marketing Officer of the Portland Trail Blazers for my book, she could point to major turning points throughout her career where mentoring helped her to grow and develop. I live in Portland and often run into members of her staff, they all tell me that Sarah maintains a culture of mentoring that makes them feel honored to work with her. They know they have a future and that they are valued. That is the secret to high employee engagement and productivity.”

“I was lucky because Bob was a natural mentor and sponsor. He was a professional colleague who readily stepped up to become my mentor. This is clearly the ideal of informal mentoring. Bob and I had been working together on a project for the chamber for two years. We met through our jobs, but didn’t work for the same companies. Our relationship began as a situational acquaintance and over time warmed into a collegial friendship and then mentoring.”

To read more click here.

Check out my latest interview at MO.com http://www.mo.com/Susan-Bender-Phelps-Odyssey-Mentoring – It will give you great insight into what really lights us up about what our business can do to help your business be more successful.

Higher Ups Get Coaching on New Trends, Technology & Social Media From Young Workers

In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, reporter Leslie Kwoh, notes an exciting new trend taking off in a wide range of companies. Instead of workplace mentors who are older and higher up in the ranks than their mentees – younger employees are being tapped to help senior executives learn new skills.

The idea is to give senior managers an opportunity to learn about life outside the corner office. If that isn’t enough of a reason, companies are seeing reduced turnover among younger employees because mentoring this way gives them a sense of purpose, along with an enlightening glimpse into the world of management and access to top tier leaders.

According to Kwoh, reverse mentoring was championed by Jack Welch when he was chief executive of General Electric Co. He had 500 top-level executives pair up with people below them to learn to use the Internet. Welch took his own advice to heart and was matched with an employee in her 20s who taught him how to surf the Web. Today young mentors are teaching their senior mentees about Facebook and Twitter.

Technology and global thinking are changing so rapidly, older executives don’t want to be left behind. Reverse mentoring also helps acculturate the younger employees more quickly. They begin to see a promising future for themselves in the organization. This boosts loyalty, employee engagement and overall productivity.

There can be pitfalls. Many older workers resist the idea of being mentored by someone younger, especially when they have so many more years of experience. This is where a solid launch event featuring the people skills that make for more effective mentoring partnerships can make all the difference in the success of the program.

Leslie Truex, author of the Work At Home Bible, interviewed Susan Bender Phelps, CEO, of Odyssey Mentoring and Leadership for an audio podcast on her website www.Work-At-HomeSuccess.com this week. You’ll learn how she started Odyssey Mentoring and Leadership and hear why mentoring skills and mentoring are so critical for professional development, employee engagement and productivity: http://workathomesuccess.com/wahs-podcast-163-susan-phelps-of-odyssey-mentor (you’ll have to copy and paste the link into your browser to get there).

An actively engaged employee is a productive member of your organization. They care, they’re motivated and they are actively contributing. In fact, a large part of your company’s success is the direct result of their accomplishments, creativity, drive and talent.

A 2006 Gallup poll found that higher performing companies have a significant difference in the ratio of engaged versus disengaged employees than lower performing organizations. That’s 8:1 for the best, and just 2:1 at the average companies. If yours is one of those high-performing companies, that’s very good news.

But, according to a 2010 survey by global consulting firm BlessingWhite, only 31 percent of the global work force is actively engaged. Overall, they found that 52 percent of the work force is not engaged. That means they come to work and do what’s expected or less. If that isn’t an eye opener; it turns out 17 percent of the workforce is actively disengaged: they show up when they feel like it, and continually undermine and work against you.

This is important because employees who aren’t engaged lower overall productivity and add to turn over and that costs you. Before the recession, the cost of replacing an employee averaged $17,000 and those who made more than $60,000 per year cost more than $38,000 to replace. Now human resource managers tell us to look at an employee’s annual salary and figure 100 to 150 percent is what it will cost you to replace them. This includes lost productivity, recruitment and training. When you consider managerial and C-suite compensation packages, the total cost is sobering.

It turns out that the best predictor of high performance is that ratio of actively engaged employees at every level of the company. And employee engagement is most positively impacted when managers have excellent people skills. Managers who have great relationships with their direct reports out-perform those who rely solely on management actions.

This leads me to conclude that mentorship skills (people skills) and a mentoring environment (learning and support) are important tools for improving employee engagement at all levels of your organization. Once you have hired the best and brightest, mentoring is one of the most effective ways to ensure they stay engaged and committed to your organization. Mentoring enhances loyalty by placing high potential employees on the fast track with the extraordinary benefit of high quality senior level guidance.

Mentoring programs deliver three proven outcomes:

• While the best skills training can produce a bump in productivity of 33 percent, training combined with effective professional mentoring improves productivity up to 88 percent.
• Mentees form stronger bonds with you and your company because they can see a worthwhile future that includes them.
• Mentors experience a stronger sense of purpose and satisfaction when they use their knowledge and expertise to cultivate and develop another person.

Costly employee turnover will be reduced because employees in an effective mentoring relationship feel appreciated, have the opportunity to give and grow. Mentees get personal coaching, sponsorship and encouragement, enhance their skills, and increased levels of confidence. Both sides of the mentoring partnership experience a greater sense of satisfaction in their careers and often in their personal lives.

Here’s where you can see the complete study: http://www.blessingwhite.com/eee__report.asp

The people skills employees need in order to have effective mentoring partnerships can be learned and Odyssey Mentoring provides the training that empowers effective mentorship.