Mentorship Begets Leadership: Establishing a Legacy of Care for Yourself and Your Team

Participants in this seminar will discuss how mentorship is an essential part of leadership development, especially now as we recover from the Covid pandemic. Leadership strategies have pivoted as a result of the pandemic. Leaders now need to address the languishing attitudes in their teams, as identified by sociologist Corey Keyes (“The Mental Health Continuum: From Languishing to Flourishing in Life.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior. 43: 207-222, 2002), as well as business professor and author Adam Grant (New York Times, 4/23/2021). Languishing is a term used to describe the “void between attitudes between depression and flourishing.”(Keyes, 2002). Symptoms of languishing include lack of motivation, disrupted focus, and a strong desire to decrease work. The pandemic effects, and more importantly, the return to normalcy after many months of social isolation, require leaders to be aware of languishing attitudes in their team and themselves. Strategies to address this as a leader and mentor will be discussed. The three learning objectives outlined below encourage participants to develop their own mentorship strategies, apply these strategies to case presentations representing interdisciplinary scenarios, and finally prepare their own plans for leadership development as they reflect on their one year and five year leadership goals.

The learning objectives include:

• Identify mentorship qualities and compare to coaching, sponsorship, and champion attributes
• Define leadership skills necessary to support teams post pandemic
• Apply the mentorship and leadership skills in three case examples

This seminar will use interactive pair sharing as well as structured use of the chat and white board function on the ZOOM platform to encourage audience participation. Participants will answer a series of questions that will help them plan future leadership opportunities and mentorship needs. The similarities and differences between mentors, coaches, sponsors, and champions will be reviewed and pertinent self- reflection questions using the book “Who’s Got Your Back” by Keith Ferrazzi will be discussed. Finally, participants will be challenged to move from languishing leadership strategies to energized, innovative leadership activities for their teams. Teams who share common goals and who receive mentorship from energized leaders may be less likely, particularly post pandemic, to experience languishing feelings and instead flourish personally and professionally.