RSS feedsEmployees who get the opportunity to work with a business mentor in their workplace deliver higher standards of work than their peers, and are proven to be more motivated and confident than colleagues who haven’t experienced mentoring.
So, it’s little wonder that blue-chip firms have been using one-to-one development schemes for many years. But there is no reason why SMEs can’t also deploy mentoring to attract, retain and encourage valued staff.
A mentor is someone with a range of personal and professional skills and experience who acts as coach, counsellor, networker and guardian, according to the needs of their mentee. Mentor and mentee, who should share common goals or values to create a chemistry, normally work on a structured programme of learning over a six or 12-month period, covering the core skills relevant to the industry sector or specialism.
Good mentors are often from outside the organisation, bringing an invaluable external perspective to the relationship, as well as an ability to ‘wire’ their mentee into their profession, exposing them to new business tools and techniques, industry contacts, professional events.
A good mentor will use a mix of face-to-face, email and telephone contact and may provide a variety of tools, such as e-learning, to suit their mentees’ needs.
What makes mentoring different from coaching is that with mentoring the primary objective is for the individual to become self-reliant over time and to become a more independent, self-managing learner. So mentoring embeds new knowledge and ways of learning, so eventually they become independently adept at learning, practising new skills and developing others.
Take responsibility
That said, it’s also important that the individual maintains responsibility for their own learning, and should be the person who identifies the specific learning need and objective for each session.
The mentor’s responsibility is to guide and set the right approach, process and environment for doing that, as well as providing direct and indirect experience and relevant external inputs to enable it.
When matching mentors and mentees it’s vital that there is a natural chemistry between them, so make sure that there is common ground and things to achieve together. Basic values and commitment to the partnership should also be agreed early on by both parties.
Establish a clear plan of action and a framework for reviewing progress and integrating new learning. The plan should include where the mentee wants to get to and how they will achieve it. The framework should set out general housekeeping, such as how meetings will be documented, who will action what and how, as well as when the ongoing quality and success of the relationship will be assessed.
Time to reflect
A framework that allows for reflection and assessment of both the mentor and mentee roles and their success is important. It should be a simple, yet carefully staged process.
This ensures that the mentor explores subjects adequately with their mentee, finds the right knowledge and experience to generate relevant new understanding, and they arrive at actions to transfer the new understanding to the mentee’s workplace, so that the mentee and their organisation and colleagues can see the benefits.
When a mentoring partnership works well, people often say it is the best thing they have ever done. As a mentee, being able to draw on knowledge and experience tailored to your needs is hugely stimulating, and being given the time, space and encouragement to then use it to achieve your own goals is a great motivator.
And it’s not just the individual that benefits. Investing in developing capability and one-to-one learning is proven to provide up to a 40% return on investment to participating companies. What is more, proactive schemes like mentoring help improve a company’s value and reputation with important stakeholders, strategic partners and even clients.
With great practitioners central to strategic success, you cannot afford not to give your key staff this valuable one-to-one time?
Keith Clark is a consultant at Moorhouse Consulting
