Ivy Exec Mentor Spotlight: Charlie Garland, President and Founder, The Innovation Outlet

 Ivy Exec Mentor Spotlight:  Gayle Rigione, Ivy Exec’s Chief Content Editor and Mentorship Program Manager, recently interviewed Charlie Garland, President and Founder, The Innovation Outlet. The Innovation Outlet is a boutique consulting firm that fields an all-star team of innovation experts, each of whom brings diverse professional and leadership experiences in different domains to client engagements.  His entrepreneurial ventures have been mentioned in The Boston Globe, The New York Post, The Los Angeles Times, WCBS radio, WEEI radio, and dozens of blogs. He also authored “The Root Cause of Innovation” in 2012 —  www.LinkedIn.com/in/innovationoutlet.   

Since Ivy Exec launched The Ivy Exec Mentor Network in May of 2012, Charlie has actively mentored many protégés, helping them take a fresh look at their careers and goals from different perspectives, serving as a catalyst for out-of-the-box thinking.  Your career….What if? Who else? Why not? These inquiry-driven insights come from Charlie’s latest project, www.TheInnovationCube.com.    

Gayle Rigione: What attracted you to join the Ivy Exec Mentor Network?

Charlie Garland: …A sense of giving back. I’ve had the pleasure and benefit of mentors throughout my life, and “giving back” (or in this case, perhaps, “paying it forward”) has become one of my highest-priority values. I can also honestly say that any such relationship between a mentor and protégé almost always delivers reciprocal value. I always learn something new and interesting when working with each unique protégé.

Gayle Rigione: What is your mentoring philosophy?

Charlie Garland:  I believe that all individuals have hidden, as well as explicit, value. This is related to my philosophy around innovation — that all resources have the potential to help create new value…you just sometimes need to know where and how to look at them, to better understand them. This is often the case with a protégé. Each individual has tremendous potential, but just hasn’t put all the pieces to the puzzle together in place yet. Having the benefit of an additional, fresh, outside perspective very often helps to identify and address assumptions or “blind spots” that are getting in the way. We are all susceptible to blind spots; thus, we can all benefit from having a mentor…even those of us who are mentors.

Gayle Rigione: What 3 words best describe your mentoring style?

Charlie Garland:  Inquisitive. Reflective. Metaphoric. When I mentor — just like when I do executive coaching — I utilize a logical model that aids me in the process of inquiry, in discovery, of the protégé’s challenges and available resources. Reflection is vital here because it is at that point when new insights can emerge…this is where true learning takes place for both of us. And using metaphoric thinking, I try to have us identify prior solutions that match similar types of problems, and imagine ways of replicating them within the protégé’s context.

Gayle Rigione: What do you enjoy most about mentoring?

Charlie Garland: I see mentoring as merely a unique manifestation of the innovation process. You as the mentor are dealing with a “landscape” of opportunity, which includes a variety of players, resources, tools, assumptions, constraints, challenges, and so on. Navigating this landscape requires collaboration, much like a game or a sport — you and the protégé form a team, sharing ideas, learning from each other, and solving problems in real time. It’s exciting and engaging.

Gayle Rigione: What is most challenging about mentoring?

Charlie Garland:  I think simply finding common time availability…in a world where everyone’s schedules are so constrained. But I most often do my mentoring sessions while driving (safely, on a hands-free device), so that affords me large blocks of uninterrupted time to talk, listen, and creatively problem-solve…at junctures where there’s not a lot else I would otherwise be doing.

Gayle Rigione: What do you consider when deciding whether or not to mentor a person?

Charlie Garland:  I first think about whether or not I am the best person to add value to a given situation. There may be other mentors who’d be more appropriately experienced for a given protégé’s challenges and ecosystem.

Gayle Rigione: When you meet, what are your expectations of your protégés?

Charlie Garland:  Really just that they will do their part to make my job as easy as possible. I like it best when protégés have a solid amount of information available, and can clearly trace the steps they’ve previously taken, as well as the assumptions they’ve made along the way. The more clearly and critically-thinking a protégé is, the easier they are to work with, and ultimately to help.

Gayle Rigione: Where do you find inspiration in your own career?

Charlie Garland:  I find it by seeing hard work pay off…either for my own or for someone else’s benefit. I truly enjoy creating new value (i.e., innovating), and realize that doing so is not always easy; it often requires quite a bit of work, focus, sacrifice, and “expense” of resources that might otherwise be used for something else, or by someone else. But seeing both my own and others’ hard work yield positive results is fuel that keeps my fire burning.

Gayle Rigione: What impact has mentoring had on your career?

Charlie Garland: It has truly been a win-win scenario; I get back at least as much — and often much more — than I give. Mentoring is a learning experience, just as much as it is a teaching event. The process is wonderful practice for what I do in much of the rest of my work day/week, as well as a refreshing and interesting complement to it.

Gayle Rigione:  What Ivy Exec career resources have you found valuable?

Charlie Garland: My favorite aspect of Ivy Exec has been its sheer volume of relevant information. Simply scanning down the list of categories that Ivy Exec as assembled for members reveals a treasure trove of accessible research on a compelling range of subjects.

Facing career hurdles?  Get one-on-one guidance from seasoned executives with The Ivy Exec Mentor Network.

The Ivy Exec Mentor Network is a powerful, community based mentoring program designed to provide career guidance to aspiring professionals who find themselves at a career crossroads. Mentors are Ivy Exec members with 15 to 20+ years of experience who volunteer their time and expertise to help other Ivy Exec members resolve serious career challenges. This unique program is global in scope and promotes broad based networking — across national borders, industries and generations — between members of Ivy Exec’s exclusive professional community. Ivy Exec – intelligence at work… Want to know more about Ivy Exec? Check out our CrunchBase profile or interact with us on Facebook.