Making the Most of Mentoring
By Anne Stuart
If you're like most professionals, it's a safe bet that, somewhere along the way, you had a significant mentor. Or maybe you've had multiple mentors–formal and informal, temporary and ongoing–throughout your career.
In any case, it's likely that at least one trusted advisor played a key role in your success–and that you're now thinking about making the same kind of guidance available to your employees.
Obviously, establishing a formal mentoring program offers tremendous benefits to both your employees and your company. By teaming midlevel staffers with executive-level consultants, you provide a boost for the younger staffers' careers; by sharpening their skills and capabilities, you increase their value to your firm.
An in-house mentoring program can contribute even longer-term benefits by protecting your organization's intellectual resources, says John Folkestad, CPA and founding partner of Salo LLC, the Minneapolis-based financial-services staffing company. “As the Baby Boomers start retiring, a lot of knowledge is going out the door with them,” Folkestad says.
“Meanwhile, the need for that same knowledge is greater than ever, thanks to the requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulations.” And as companies continue recovering from the recent recession, they keep pushing their accounting and other departments to do more with less, he adds: “You have to react more quickly, provide more information, and be more accountable.”
For that reason, companies nationwide are developing mentor programs that match their key employees with trusted experts, such as Salo's consultants. A well-run mentor program can help your organization develop resources to meet those growing demands and, by passing knowledge from senior to younger employees, keep valuable expertise inside your company's walls.
In addition, mentoring programs can help attract and retain your talent, says Judith Lindenberger, president of the Lindenberger Group LLC, a Titusville, N.J.-based consulting firm. She should know: In a previous life as an HR executive with Brown-Forman Corp., an 8,500-employee Fortune 1000 company whose brands include Jack Daniel's whiskey, Korbel champagne and Dansk china, she developed a mentoring program credited in part for convincing top out-of-state job candidates to relocate to the company's hometown of Louisville, Ky.
In defining mentoring, it's easiest to start with what the concept isn't.
Mentoring isn't teaching–although learning is certainly involved–because mentors function more as guides than instructors. As Lois J. Zachary, president of Leadership Development Services LLC, a Phoenix-based consulting firm, puts it: “It's more than just pouring knowledge into someone's head.”
It's also not career counseling. And it's not coaching, because coaches are typically outsiders hired temporarily to help employees improve specific skills. Mentors, in contrast, take a longer-term, big-picture approach to helping their less-experienced colleagues grow in their careers. (For more on mentor traits, see “What Makes a Mentor?”)
So what exactly does mentoring involve? “It's really a reciprocal learning relationship in which both parties agree to a partnership,” says Zachary, author of Creating a Mentoring Culture: An Organization's Guide and other books on the topic. “They work toward achieving mutually defined goals that develop the mentee's skills, abilities and thinking, and there's mutual accountability.”
For instance, a senior financial executive mentoring a midlevel accounting manager might start by encouraging the younger staffer to hammer out a specific goal, such as moving into a more strategic business role. Then the mentor might recommend books, classes or conferences, or perhaps facilitate some networking lunches with professionals in the protégé's desired field. Meanwhile, the two would probably meet regularly to discuss the protégé's progress and agree upon the next steps.
In another scenario, you might hire a consultant to mentor a team leader for the duration of a new type of project, again building that knowledge into your company so that the next time that kind of work pops up, you'll be ready to handle it. Meanwhile, the individual mentoring relationship can continue indefinitely even after the project ends.
Or you might contract with a mentor to guide a manager through a critical transition. For instance, you might bring in a financial consultant who's worked extensively with public companies to mentor a new CFO facing his first IPO. Or you might choose a consultant to mentor a young female executive who, thanks to a promotion, is suddenly the highest-ranking woman in her organization.
Sound easy? Think again, says Lindenberger, whose mentoring programs have twice won national awards. “People say, ‘Mentoring? Oh, I can do that; it can't be that hard,'” Lindenberger says. “And it isn't hard. But you do have to have a plan.”
Planning begins by building a mentoring mindset into your corporate culture. That involves taking the following steps:
- Set business goals. Consider what you'd like your overall organization to gain from mentoring, and shape your program accordingly. For instance, Brown-Forman evolved into a global company, and its leadership wanted to step up efforts to hire and promote women and minorities–a goal that Lindenberger says the company readily achieved through an intensive mentoring program.
- Enlist top support. If the organization's leaders champion mentoring–and approve the resources necessary to make it happen–others will view the effort as a priority as well.
- Promote the concept. Make sure everyone views mentoring as a desirable–and voluntary–perk rather than as a burden or, worse, a probationary or punitive tactic. Encourage employees to make time for mentoring. Recognize and reward exceptional mentors.
- Coordinate efforts company-wide. Otherwise, some departments may create vibrant mentoring partnerships while others offer little more than half-hearted matchmaking.
- Designate multiple point people. If the mentoring initiative is tied too tightly to one employee, “it will walk out the door when that person leaves the company,” Zachary warns.
- Track the results. (“What doesn't get measured doesn't get done,” Zachary notes.) Adjust the program as needed to better support mentoring partnerships or meet new business goals.
Finally, pay special attention to how you match mentors and protégés. Obviously, you should look for a good fit in terms of personality, experience and goals. But Lindenberger warns that that two other minefields are actually more likely to sabotage mentoring initiatives.
They are:
- Lack of interest. “Both parties have to be willing,” Lindenberger says. If either party is forced to participate–for instance, if a consultant who's already flat out reluctantly takes on a protégé, or if a supervisor assigns a mentor to an employee as a last-ditch effort to improve performance–the relationship is doomed.
- Lack of time. For mentoring to succeed, both parties must build the effort into their schedules—a task that's easier when the mentor is a part-time or full-time consultant assigned to a specific person or group. Otherwise, if the mentor is too busy to return phone calls or the protégé gets too wrapped up in work to complete the recommended career-building assignments, the partnership will fail.
But when the process works–when you've made good matches in a strong, supportive environment–everybody wins. Research indicates that former mentors value the experience at least as much–and sometimes more–than their protégés do, Lindenberger says. Perhaps that's why so many protégés, including Lindenberger and Zachary, go on to become mentors themselves.
About the Author
JumpStart contributor Anne Stuart writes frequently about business, workplace and career issues. A former writer and editor for Inc. and CIO magazines and The Associated Press, she is now a freelance writer based in Boston. You can reach her at Anne.S@BeTuitive.com.
Copyright © 2005 BeTuitive Marketing
|
