As I concluded this important assignment, it occurred to me that this agency is engaged in “dynamic mentoring.” What’s dynamic about it? At least a half-dozen dimensions, but here are three:

First of all, it is dynamic in the sense that crime today is always changing, particularly crimes involving the abuse of technology and/or financial institutions and instruments. Some crimes are variations on old themes, but others are unprecedented. For that reason, the technical competencies developed through coaching efforts are always in motion just to keep up with the criminals who are becoming increasingly skilled in their R&D (research and development) exploits.

Second, the older, more established employees have insights and skills to contribute to the more recently hired. However, the younger employees bring “tricks of the trade” learned through their recent formal education and/or prior jobs. There’s something for everyone in this mentoring equation.

The third dynamism is that employee-centered mentoring and organization-centered coaching feed on one another in an interactive, synergistic manner. As the employee grows in understanding and competency, areas for mentoring attention that were once invisible become relevant and find their way onto the mentoring agenda.

The program involves structured visits to headquarters and to other agency locations.  Pair-ups of mentors with mentees are decided by senior management based on a variety of considerations. Rotational assignments to provide first-hand experience in, e.g., executing search warrants, etc. build both competence and confidence. 

In a world where employee development is given short shrift too often, it is exciting and encouraging to see things being done right!

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.

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.

A frequent and appropriate concern in strategic planning is whether the resources needed to fund the plan are available: Is our financial plan adequately supportive of our strategic plan? Another concern is whether the human capital needed to implement the plan will be on-board and ready to go: Stated differently, is our workforce planning aligned with our strategic planning? (The financial plan and the workforce plan should be components of the strategic plan, either in the main body or as annexes).

There’s a push-pull between the development of a strategic plan and available financial and human resources. On the one hand, strategic planning which simply assumes the resource status quo can become constrained and unimaginative, tending to recite the way things are rather than the way things should be. On the other hand, a pie-in-the-sky plan quickly degenerates into a bookshelf ornament, breeding cynicism at best and fear-and-loathing at worst.

Achieving consensus concerning our resource assumptions allows us to create a workable strategic plan—doable by “stretching” ourselves to implement it. But would you want a strategic plan that wasn’t ambitious? You may be lucky and have the financial and human resources needed to create an ideal strategic plan right from the start, but most of us do ambitious strategic planning with the proviso that the plan will need to be adjusted iteratively in view of real financial and human resource constraints. Getting this right is a balancing act: Oddly, we must sometimes put the cart before the horse for a time before we can correctly position the cart after the horse. This process may need to be repeated once or twice until goodness of fit among all plan components has been achieved.

A comprehensive strategic plan aligns strategy with both systems and structure, organized solidly around vision, mission, goals and objectives. Systems refer not only to electronic systems but to defined core processes. Structure refers not only to the organizational configuration of talent, but also to needed capabilities and capacities.  Capabilities are the skill sets and talent competency levels needed to implement the plan and perform the work. Capacities are the required amount of a given capability at relevant levels of mastery, expressed in person-hours or person-years. Correct specification of capabilities and capacities is central to effective workforce planning.

Effective workforce planning answers this pivotal question: If the strategic plan expresses what we intend to accomplish, then what is the mix of present and future talent that will be required to implement the plan and how will this mix be cultivated? Peter Drucker said it best, “Plans are nothing until they degenerate into work.” 

If we are going to have a plan, then we’d best have the talent needed to implement it successfully. Otherwise, a strategic plan without a workforce plan could end up being just a cart without a horse.