Mentoring is an effective way of helping people to progress in their
careers. In the first of a two-part series, we look at how this powerful
tool can be used by companies.
February 28, 2013:
In today’s fast paced, rapidly
changing and dynamic environment, it is imperative for organizations to
invest in harnessing the talent within the organisation for long-term
sustenance. The war for talent is creating challenges within the
organisation not only to recruit new talent, but to retain it too.
A
mentor provides you with wisdom, technical knowledge, assistance,
support, empathy and respect throughout, and often beyond, your career.
The objective is to enable mentees to grow personally and professionally
by passing on their wisdom. Mentoring comes from the Greek word meaning
‘enduring’ and is defined as a sustained relationship between a youth
and an adult. It is a process that always involves communication and is
relationship based, but its precise definition is elusive. One
definition of the many that have been proposed is — Mentoring is a
strategic approach to developing an employee by pairing mentee with a
more experienced employee who will teach, coach, counsel and energise
the employee.
Another definition is: Mentoring is a
process for the informal transmission of knowledge, social capital, and
the psychosocial support perceived by the recipient as relevant to work,
career, or professional development; mentoring entails informal
communication, usually face-to-face and during a sustained period of
time, between a person who is perceived to have greater relevant
knowledge, wisdom, or experience (the mentor) and a person who is
perceived to have less (the mentee).
Another one —
Mentoring is usually a formal or informal relationship between two
people-a senior mentor (usually outside the protege's chain of
supervision) and a junior protege. Mentoring has been identified as an
important influence in professional development in both the public and
private sector.
To sum up, it is a nurturing process
and a mentor can be a source of information and a thoughtful guide
through the complexities of unspoken, but potentially career-enhancing /
limiting organisational norms.
Mentoring is a
powerful personal development and empowerment tool. It is an effective
way of helping people to progress in their careers and is becoming
increasing popular as its potential is realised.
Corporates
today are using mentoring as a strategic tool to harness the several
benefits it provides. There is increased employee performance and
employee engagement. Skills are enhanced besides employee development
and retention. There is knowledge sharing and commitment to the
organisation.
Types of Mentoring
New-hire Mentorship: New-hire
mentoring programs are set up to help new employees acclimate more
quickly into the organisation. In new-hire mentoring programs, newcomers
(mentees) are paired with more experienced people (mentors) in order to
obtain information, good examples, and advice as they advance. It has
been claimed that new employees who are paired with a mentor are twice
as likely to remain in their job compared to those who do not receive
mentoring.
High-potential Mentorship: High-potential
mentoring programs are used to groom up-and-coming employees deemed to
have the potential to move up into leadership roles. Here the employee
is paired with a senior level leader (or leaders) for a series of
career-coaching interactions. These programs tend to be smaller than
more general mentoring programs and mentees must be selected to
participate.
Business Mentoring: The concept
of mentoring has entered the business domain as well. This is different
from being an apprentice, a business mentor provides guidance to a
business owner or an entrepreneur on the entrepreneur’s business. An
apprentice learns a trade by working on the job with the employer.
Reverse Mentoring: In
the reverse mentoring situation, the mentee has more overall experience
(typically as a result of age) than the mentor (who is typically
younger), but the mentor has more knowledge in a particular area, and as
such, reverses the typical constellation. Examples are when young
Internet or mobile savvy millennial generation teens train executives in
using high end smart phones.
Mentoring Techniques
The
focus of mentoring is to develop the whole person and so the techniques
are broad and require wisdom in order to be used appropriately. A 1995
study of mentoring techniques most commonly used in business, found that
the five most commonly used techniques among mentors were:
Accompanyingg: Making a commitment in a caring way, which involves taking part in the learning process side-by-side with the learner.
Sowing: Mentors
are often confronted with the difficulty of preparing the learner
before he is ready to change. Sowing is necessary when you know that
what you say may not be understood or even acceptable to learners at
first but will make sense and have value to the mentee when the
situation requires it.
Catalysing: When change
reaches a critical level of pressure, learning can escalate. Here the
mentor chooses to plunge the learner right into change, provoking a
different way of thinking, a change in identity or a re-ordering of
values.
Showing: This is making something
understandable, or using your own example to demonstrate a skill or
activity. You show what you are talking about, you show by your own
behaviour.
Harvesting: Here the mentor focuses
on “picking the ripe fruit”. It is usually used to create awareness of
what was learnt by experience and to draw conclusions. The key
questions here are: “What have you learned?”, “How useful is it?”.
Mentoring Programs
Formal
mentoring programs offer employees the opportunity to participate in an
organised mentoring program. Participants join as a mentor, mentee or
both by completing a mentoring profile. Mentoring profiles are completed
as written forms. Informal mentoring takes place at organization that
develop a culture of mentoring but do not have formal system in place.
These companies may provide some tools and resources and encourage
managers to accept mentoring requests from more junior members of the organisation.
Mentoring Objectives
Be an
inspiring and competent mentor. Understand the power and positive
consequences of mentoring. Develop mutually beneficial expectations and
objectives. Understand mentee needs and how to address them. Determine
responsibilities and guidelines. Hold productive discussions with
mentees. Deal with mentoring challenges in the organisation. Use
effective communication and listening skills to build rapport. Use
questioning skill for uncovering needs and feedback skills for objective
assessment.
Pr-requisite for Mentoring
I
have found that persons with a high emotional quotient (EQ) tend to make
better mentors. It is therefore, strongly recommended that Emotional
Intelligence Appraisal is done to assess their EQ, as one of the
pre-requisites for choosing mentors.
