Do-It-Yourself Mentoring Briefing: Ready for You to Deliver!
One of the joys of delivering our mentoring training programs to both mentors and mentees in both public and private organizations is to see the enthusiasm that mentees have for achieving professional growth. Similarly, the satisfaction that mentors enjoy from helping someone develop and become more competitive in this difficult labor market is yet another pleasure.
There are important benefits for the employing organization as well as benefits for both mentees and mentors. These benefits do not come for free, however. There are costs associated with standing up a mentoring program, sustaining it, and expanding it over time.
Today’s organizations run lean, hard-pressed by constraints of time and money. In some cases, on-the-ground supervisors will view mentoring as a frill, a distraction from getting today’s “real work” accomplished, as if preparing tomorrow’s workforce isn’t a legitimate part of today’s real work. That said, there are costs associated with mounting a mentoring program. The costs are not huge, but they are real and they must be factored as part of the business case.
We have received calls from people in numerous organizations who are in the early stages of considering a mentoring program. These folks are often in the midst of making a business case for mentoring that top leadership will consider.
Typically speaking, part of the process is to provide leadership with a briefing on mentoring. We believe that it is essential that everyone’s consideration of mentoring proceed on the basis of a solid foundation. That’s why we developed The Effective Mentoring Briefing. We have even put this briefing together in a way that permits the user to customize it for the number of minutes the briefing has been allocated for a leadership meeting.
The briefing provides a solid foundation that defines mentoring and distinguishes it from coaching. It spells out typical benefits for the organization, mentor and mentee and also provides example costs that may be incurred. The briefing describes how mentoring works and what an effective mentor does as part of an organized mentoring program.
We’ve done the work of developing this briefing for you based on our experience in working with numerous organizations and in training thousands of mentors and mentees over the past decade. The briefing provides a factual, unbiased presentation concerning mentoring. It doesn’t try to “sell” mentoring. On the other hand, we hope that it persuades contemporary leaders to use mentoring as a tool to cultivate tomorrow’s leadership today.
For more information, please see detailed product information.
Mentoring for Improved Employee Morale
Mentoring programs are morale-builders. They replenish energy among those who are expected to be more productive tomorrow than they were yesterday. Mentoring’s considerable contributions to morale and energy are an investment in tomorrow and an investment in today.
As an example, a forward-looking city government in Southern California, with which we have had the privilege of working as mentoring training consultants, has leveraged its mentoring program to build a strong esprit de corps throughout its workforce. The commitment of staff to bettering themselves spills over into the important work that they do everyday.
A recent study published by the Harvard Business Review (January-February 2010 issue, "What Really Motivates Workers" by Teresa M. Amabile) reports that an important ingredient, perhaps the most important ingredient in employee satisfaction is having a sense of making progress in the work that the employee is doing. At Strategic Futures, we believe that this principle applies not only to the work that the employee does for the organization, but also the work that the employee does on and for himself or herself.
Mentoring is as important, perhaps more important, in economically difficult times as it is during times of prosperity. It’s neither a secret nor inappropriate that employees who leverage your organization’s mentoring program and seek out mentors are committed to cultivating their careers. Naturally, it’s important for mentors to make plain that extraordinary efforts to develop oneself are not a guarantee that promotion will follow. Expectations must be set judiciously. The bottom line is that employees who make an investment of time and effort in bettering themselves and their skills are likely to increase the probability of promotion or other rewards, but there is no guarantee.
That said, career mobility in today’s flattened organizations is not what it once was. Promotions and rewards in budget-constricted organizations can be few and far between. Indeed, sustaining one’s gainful employment at a status quo level is a challenge in many places.
However, these difficult times can be viewed by employees as an opportunity to “pre-position” themselves for future career gains. Once the protégé or mentee, has grasped today’s economic realities, s/he can gain motivation from the fact that they are gearing themselves up for opportunities that will eventually emerge. A large cadre of mentees who share this optimistic view and who continue to improve themselves affords vital positive energy to the enterprises that are strapped by current economic challenges.
When you are considering the possibilities for high-return HR investments, give mentoring programs a close look.
Toyota Breakdown Linked to Decline of Mentoring
The Washington Post reported on February 13, 2010, that the “Toyota Way” was derailed in part because the company had thinned its ranks of expert mentors. The article quoted Susan Helper, a professor of economics at Case Western University in Cleveland, as follows: “So much of what made the company work well was that each manager was personally trained by a mentor who himself had long experience with the company. When the fast expansion came, Toyota was very short of senior managers who were ready to become mentors.”
Whether you are dealing with explosive growth, constricted staffing, or simply the changing of the guard as a new generation replenishes the ranks, the Toyota story is instructive: Mentoring is not an HR frill to be dismissed lightly. Indeed, as the Toyota example demonstrates, sufficient high-quality mentoring is the make-or-break difference in ensuring continuity of quality and productivity as well as pivotal values and norms. Those who have brought success to an enterprise can and should pass the torch to those who will bring future success after the mentors have moved on. Effective mentoring is the passing of this torch of success–a torch that is not passed by accident or raw luck.
It takes several years to ramp up a quality mentoring program with an adequate stable of capable mentors. This cannot be done overnight. No mentoring “miracle-grow” exists. Fancy electronics won’t get it done either.
Mentoring is a long-term investment intended to yield long-term benefits and as such, it conflicts with day-to-day operating imperatives. Long-range initiatives are trumped regularly by the emergencies of the day. Those of us in the training business often hear “there is no good time for training.” This logic suggests that there is no good time for mentoring either. That said, ask Toyota if there is a good time for failing.
Once your mentoring program has developed momentum, it is essential that it be maintained adequately. This means ensuring that new mentors are cultivated and that legacy mentors are refreshed periodically. In addition, once target mentor-mentee ratios have been established for the workforce, an enterprise must ensure that these ratios are maintained properly.
We don’t know if quantitative and qualitative indicators of mentoring were Balanced Scorecard dashboard items at Toyota, but we surmise that Toyota now wishes that it had paid more attention to the maintenance of a mentoring program that was once the envy of its industry. “Short-Term Bottom-Line Fast Buck Freddy” companies don’t and won’t make the long-term investment that quality mentoring requires, but “Built to Last” companies will.
To ignore mentoring is to ignore the long-term interests of your stakeholders. Today’s choices surrounding mentoring are your strategic future. The strategic future is now.
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