By Florence Stone
Mentoring is a trend sweeping through corporate America.
It has gone beyond the hundreds of thousands of informal relationships
that occur as ambitious employees and managers-not to mention would-be
entrepreneurs-look for ways to achieve their career goals faster through
the help of a more experienced advisor. Increasingly, companies are running
formal mentoring programs as they see how they can shorten learning tracks,
speed up managerial advancement and build the next generation of leaders.
Companies have found that mentoring initiatives benefit
not only the mentorees but the mentors, too. Those who act as mentors
grow their coaching and counseling skills, expand their access to information
and build contacts and gain a sense of well being from sharing their know-how
with another.
Variations on an Old Theme
Corporate programs take various forms. We're familiar with the traditional
version of mentoring, where older, more experienced individuals advise
younger, less experienced ones. They meet in a quiet office or over lunch
during which the more experienced individual shares his or her wisdom.
Such mentors also serve as role models, introduce their protégés
to people who can help them advance in their careers and recommend their
mentorees for highly prized assignments and great new jobs. But today's
corporate programs may have senior managers being mentored by their juniors
in the organization, employees mentoring each other, a single employee
or manager being mentored by multiple mentors over time, each one chosen
to meet a specific development need, and even temps mentoring one another.
Global firms have experienced managers abroad mentor
new recruits with overseas assignments, preparing them for cultural adjustments
via e-mail communications.
Reverse Mentoring
Of the new versions of mentoring mentioned, those in which senior executives
are coached by younger employees may have triggered the most interest
by the business community, maybe because one of the first individuals
to participate in such a program was Jack Welch. This kind of program
has come to be known as "reverse mentoring." Often, reverse
mentoring programs are part of a broader mentoring initiative, with some
programs designed to improve senior management diversity and others to
help individuals reach full potential faster.
Most reverse programs are designed to keep their top
managers and executives familiar with the latest developments in an ever-changing
field. Technology is understandably one of the most frequent subjects
for reverse mentoring. It was the subject of reverse mentoring at GE.
Over 1000 senior executives, including Welch, were coached by lower-ranking
technology experts about what was happening on the Internet to help the
executives make the best operating and strategic decisions related to
the technological revolution.
The techies who were in the program were carefully selected.
They might have been young and low ranking in the organization but they
had to have the self-confidence to teach the senior executives about technology
trends, even insist that senior executives, tied up with other business,
keep scheduled meetings for the instruction.
What was the benefit of such reverse mentoring? Dollar
savings, as senior managers maximized the use of the technology and were
able to make better decisions when IT departments presented them with
various purchasing options.
Procter & Gamble also has a reverse mentoring program.
The mentors are one to two levels below those whom they coach, and the
coaching is designed to help these senior executives to develop greater
self-awareness of their behaviors.
Leadership Coach
The role of mentor also varies-from the mentor as career counselor to
role model to leadership coach. In creating the next generation of leaders,
a mentor's commitment is to:
- Offer instructive stories to clarify what leadership is and its responsibilities.
- Counsel the protégé about values, integrity and ethical
conduct when appropriate.
- Use the Socratic method to explore various solutions to problems and
identify the best paths to follow.
- Help the protégé recognize the outcomes of his or her
actions and plans.
Along the way, the mentor offers skills, abilities and
knowledge, but it is in offering the broader view that corporate leaders,
as mentors, build the next generation of leaders for their organization.
Organizations have come to recognize that developing future leaders is
not a luxury, but a strategic necessity. Forward-thinking organizations
have initiated leadership development programs in which mentoring plays
an important part. Among these companies is the World Bank.
World Bank began its first mentoring initiative for
women eager for advancement in Asia in 1997. Since then, it has begun
16 other mentoring programs, each demand-driven. Some programs are region-specific,
others are topic-specific, such as the legal or transportation efforts
mentoring groups. Each program has its own coordinator and these coordinators--all
of whom have full-time jobs in the bank--meet every two months to discuss
progress success. Coordinators are expected to have good interpersonal
skills and not only a commitment to the mentoring effort but also the
bank itself-they must plan on staying with the bank for the next five
years.
Each mentoring group has its own steering committee
composed of six to eight employees who match mentors and protégés.
In making such pairings, the group checks to see that no reporting relationship
exists and that there is at least one grade level that separates mentors
from mentorees. An effort is made to match cultural similarities and educational
levels. The process is called "facilitated mentoring," but there
are no guidelines about the number of meetings between mentor and protégé
over time. The intent of meetings is not to set an action plan but rather
to offer feedback.
After two months, mentoring partners are asked if they
are meeting and how the process is working. There is not only oral feedback
but also a written evaluation that allows each partner to rate the pair's
progress in career planning, discussion of organizational culture and
refinement of interpersonal skills. A third evaluation is used to get
feedback from the pair on the mentoring level achieved. Protégés
are not asked if they dislike or like their mentors
Mentors have said that they have become better listeners,
demonstrate greater interest in coaching staff and believe that the experience
was useful. Mentorees report that the mentoring relationship has raised
their morale, increased their capabilities and contributed to shared listening.
What Do You Want in a Mentor?
Not all corporate programs are as structured as that at World Bank. Many
of the programs do the pairing but others leave it up to those who are
in the program to find a counterpart. Those companies that have been successful
with their programs have been selective in their choice not only of protégés,
but also mentors, however. Not every executive can serve as the model
of leadership for future managers and executives. Mentors must be individuals
of impeccable credibility and their advice must always ring true. Mentorees
must be able to implicitly trust their mentors. Mentors cannot behave
like hot-air balloons, more in love with the sound of their own voices
than the task they have set for themselves of helping another person up
the corporate ladder.
Fortunately, within today's businesses, such executives
and managers exist. As I look over the various mentoring initiatives today,
it is clear that wise companies recognize that nobody lives forever, not
even the biggest of big-shot executives in the business world. So they
have prepared a pathway for their rising stars.
Would a Mentoring Program Work in Your Company?
Don't consider instituting a mentoring program just because it is trendy.
First ask yourself these questions:
- What would be the business reasons for developing a program?
- What organization support exists or would need to be developed?
- What will be our criteria for success?
- Who is going to manage, coordinate and oversee the program?
- What mentoring already exists?
- How will we pair mentors and protégés?
- Are there pairings we should avoid?
- What ongoing support, if any, should we provide?
- How often should pairs meet?
- How will we communicate to our managers and employees the existence
of such a program?
To learn more, consider these AMA seminars & AMACOM
book:
Author Bio: Florence Stone is editorial director
of AMA and editor of AMA's quarterly journal, MWorld. She is the
author of Coaching, Counseling and Mentoring, The Manager's Question
and Answer Book and, most recently, The Essential New Manager's
Kit. She is currently at work on a new book on informal and facilitated
mentoring entitled The Mentoring Advantage (Dearborn).
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