HR can learn from organizations that have stumbled while implementing mentoring programs
By the end of 2005, B.C. credit union VanCity should be piloting its first formal mentoring program.
The suggestion came from a group of employees in a leadership development program who were charged with exploring the benefits of business mentoring, explains Grace Pulver, director of organizational development.
They were asked to consider, among other things, what mentoring in the workplace generally means, why other companies do it and whether VanCity should change its approach.
“There is a lot of informal mentoring that goes on already,” she says. The culture of the organization is such that people at all levels feel comfortable calling superiors and senior-level executives and asking for help, she says.
But the group concluded the company may improve retention and make further strides in becoming a learning organization by formalizing the practice. They recommended the company try formal mentoring via a pilot program (with five mentorship pairings) to be launched in 2005.
About 60 per cent of the VanCity workforce are under 35, and they’re attracted to the possibilities for growth and development that a mentoring program represents, says Pulver.
This is a common sentiment among many Canadian HR professionals. As a strategy for human resources development, formalized mentoring is very much in vogue these days.
Peer Resources, a Victoria-based non-profit corporation committed to promoting and assisting with mentoring programs, surveyed more than 1,700 Canadian employers two years ago on the issue. It found more than 70 per cent of respondents have some form of mentoring, though just 17 per cent said the program was formal. Since then interest has only gone up, says Rey Carr, chief knowledge officer for Peer Resources.
By and large, mentoring is a win-win proposition. Making contacts with senior executives has obvious appeal for high-potential employees looking to carve out a career path, while for HR leaders (and the rest of the organization) mentoring can be a valuable tool to retain people and develop the next generation of executives.
By formalizing the practice, organizations can hopefully ensure maximum benefits are being realized for everyone involved.
Of course, it is only a win-win if mentoring is done right. And here the picture is less clear.
While there is not a great deal of quantitative evidence, it seems that more organizations are reporting success, says Carr.
In some cases success is easy to define. Typically, organizations that implement a mentoring program will pretty quickly see improvements to retention numbers, he says.
But if the goal is to develop a new generation of leaders, it would be difficult to say how successful mentoring has been. The goal is a long term one.
That said, there is no question some organizations have stumbled while implementing mentoring programs. From those mistakes emerge valuable lessons.
Carr says organizations should be careful about simply copying successful programs from other organizations. “The program has to fit the culture of the company.” One company may use an interest-based tool to match mentors and proteges with similar interests, but another company may have a culture where people prefer to make their own decisions and find their own partners, he says. In those cases people will resent using that tool.
Another key ingredient to successful mentoring is close monitoring of the process, outcomes and relationships, he says. “Some programs are just match ’em up and let ’em be. That is a dangerous approach.”
Someone has to check in with the two participants to make sure they are on the same page about expectations and plans, especially at the beginning, says Carr.
For example a mentor may expect the protege to come into the first meeting and share all personal goals and concerns, while the protege may be uncomfortable about being so open right from the beginning. In that case the relationship could be lost from the start. The mentor may feel he is wasting his time because the protege is holding back, while the protege may resent the pressure to open up right away.
“They’ll end up finding various reasons not to make their meetings together,” he says.
Paul Gibson, vice-president of HR for Winnipeg-based furniture manufacturer Palliser, says they aren’t planning on introducing formal mentoring program any time soon. The reason? The programs he’s observed, and in some cases experienced, have not been that successful.
The programs are not necessarily flawed, but expectations are often unrealistic, he says.
Truly effective mentoring takes place over years and has to cover the entire spectrum of an individual’s growth and development. What’s more, it is difficult for someone to be completely honest if the mentor is inside the organization, he says.
“If you can’t say to someone, ‘I am not quite right for this job,’ then (that person) is probably not a mentor,” he says.
“HR may be better off finding senior people in other businesses and see if they would be willing to work as a mentor for their staff.”
Instead of a formal long-term and holistic mentoring program, Palliser is considering rolling out a short-term, skill-specific coaching program. “As we go through development plans, if we identify someone who needs to be stronger in a competency in a particular area, we’ll look for someone to mentor that particular skill for a period of time and then let (the relationship) dissolve,” he says.
William Gray, a former professor at the University of British Columbia and now president of the Victoria-based Corporate Mentoring Solutions Inc., has been helping organizations develop mentoring programs for the last 17 years. There is no question a lot of organizations are struggling to implement mentoring effectively, he says.
“Well over half of the business we get is based on organizations having tried mentoring and it didn’t work. Relationships fall apart and people just don’t meet,” he says.
Many people underestimate how complex the mentoring process is and how much work it takes to make it successful, he says. “They just think it is as easy as announcing mentoring will happen and expecting it will.”
The right people have to be chosen and training has to be provided so that all participants, both mentors and proteges, understand what is expected of them. They have to be given some tools that will help them work on identifying and developing needs and goals. “If you don’t give them some training, anything and everything can happen,” he says.
Gray makes a clear distinction between coaching and mentoring. Coaching typically refers to the development of a single skill set. So coaching is part of mentoring, but just one part. Mentoring is long term and deals with the development of the whole person, not just a single skill set, he says.
Mentoring is a different kind of relationship, he says. “It is wanting the protege to become all that they can become, and along the way you’re going to equip them with what you know and empower them to be what they can be,” he says.
“If you are not both equipping them with what you know and empowering them; if all you are doing is encouraging them to be you, that is not mentoring.”
For the rest of this year, the organizational development team at VanCity will be looking at mentoring programs and coming up with a business case and drafting a program that will fit into the VanCity context, says Pulver. For example, the employee group that recommended the company explore a formal mentoring program, did so with an important caveat, she says. “They said don’t get overly structured, because then it doesn’t fit with our culture.”
The admission process won’t be overly bureaucratic, she says. VanCity employees will be turned off by countless forms and a multi-layered approval process.
Pulver and two of her organizational design colleagues have experience creating mentoring programs in other organizations. A research analyst has also been hired to study programs in about 30 other organizations.
The greatest challenge will always be finding time, she says. As long as both people are realistic about the time they can commit, technology should make it easier, she says. After the first few face-to-face meetings, a lot of mentoring can be done via e-mail, for example. There has to be good chemistry between the two partners and ideally the learning should be reciprocal. The protege should be able to teach the mentor a thing or two as well.
Mentoring should not only be about talking and proffering advice, the mentor should be helping the protege understand how things actually work in the organization, she says.
In one of the programs Pulver worked with in another organization, a senior executive who was mentoring an administrative assistant wanted to take the protege into the executive committee meeting. Some of the committee members were uncomfortable with that, she says. There was nothing wrong with the idea, but the rest of the executive committee should have been warned beforehand, she says. “If you are going to do things outside the norm, don’t surprise people.”
Advantages of mentoring
For the partner/protege
•provides career advice and direction through greater self knowledge;
•provides accessible role models;
•increases job satisfaction, typically leading to longer tenure with the organization, thus increasing long-term benefits;
•increases self confidence and career aspirations;
•being part of a mentoring program says the organization values employees as an individual and not just a cog in a wheel;
•develops broader perspectives in junior staff;
•provides junior staff with ongoing support, encouragement and spiritual support;
•gives junior staff access to inside information and organizational dynamics;
•partners gain advice on self presentation and behaviour so that they can fit into formal culture;
•partners learn how to publicize themselves within the informal workplace culture and learn who are key decision-makers in the organization and which executives have the real power;
•improves accuracy of communication and communication network, leading to better knowledge management; and
•helps women and minority groups break through the glass ceiling or concrete barriers.
For the mentor
•exposes senior staff to new ideas;
•provides senior staff with an incentive to keep up to date;
•enables senior staff to know what is happening at more junior levels;
•provides the mentor with a different perspective on the organization;
•increases peer recognition;
•provides an opportunity to increase personal reputation by being surrounded by talented people — this will in turn attract other talented people to work with the mentor;
•provides opportunities to reflect on skills and practices;
•yields time out to update and refresh management skills and knowledge;
•provides an opportunity to challenge the accepted ways of doing things in the organization;
•presents a challenging learning experience;
•yields an opportunity to broaden understanding of the organization;
•typically results in a stimulating, rewarding and enjoyable experience;
•helps clarify a mentor’s learning needs; and
•helps senior people avoid feeling plateaued in terms of contributions — renews spiritual vigour.
Source: Peer Resources
The suggestion came from a group of employees in a leadership development program who were charged with exploring the benefits of business mentoring, explains Grace Pulver, director of organizational development.
They were asked to consider, among other things, what mentoring in the workplace generally means, why other companies do it and whether VanCity should change its approach.
“There is a lot of informal mentoring that goes on already,” she says. The culture of the organization is such that people at all levels feel comfortable calling superiors and senior-level executives and asking for help, she says.
But the group concluded the company may improve retention and make further strides in becoming a learning organization by formalizing the practice. They recommended the company try formal mentoring via a pilot program (with five mentorship pairings) to be launched in 2005.
About 60 per cent of the VanCity workforce are under 35, and they’re attracted to the possibilities for growth and development that a mentoring program represents, says Pulver.
This is a common sentiment among many Canadian HR professionals. As a strategy for human resources development, formalized mentoring is very much in vogue these days.
Peer Resources, a Victoria-based non-profit corporation committed to promoting and assisting with mentoring programs, surveyed more than 1,700 Canadian employers two years ago on the issue. It found more than 70 per cent of respondents have some form of mentoring, though just 17 per cent said the program was formal. Since then interest has only gone up, says Rey Carr, chief knowledge officer for Peer Resources.
By and large, mentoring is a win-win proposition. Making contacts with senior executives has obvious appeal for high-potential employees looking to carve out a career path, while for HR leaders (and the rest of the organization) mentoring can be a valuable tool to retain people and develop the next generation of executives.
By formalizing the practice, organizations can hopefully ensure maximum benefits are being realized for everyone involved.
Of course, it is only a win-win if mentoring is done right. And here the picture is less clear.
While there is not a great deal of quantitative evidence, it seems that more organizations are reporting success, says Carr.
In some cases success is easy to define. Typically, organizations that implement a mentoring program will pretty quickly see improvements to retention numbers, he says.
But if the goal is to develop a new generation of leaders, it would be difficult to say how successful mentoring has been. The goal is a long term one.
That said, there is no question some organizations have stumbled while implementing mentoring programs. From those mistakes emerge valuable lessons.
Carr says organizations should be careful about simply copying successful programs from other organizations. “The program has to fit the culture of the company.” One company may use an interest-based tool to match mentors and proteges with similar interests, but another company may have a culture where people prefer to make their own decisions and find their own partners, he says. In those cases people will resent using that tool.
Another key ingredient to successful mentoring is close monitoring of the process, outcomes and relationships, he says. “Some programs are just match ’em up and let ’em be. That is a dangerous approach.”
Someone has to check in with the two participants to make sure they are on the same page about expectations and plans, especially at the beginning, says Carr.
For example a mentor may expect the protege to come into the first meeting and share all personal goals and concerns, while the protege may be uncomfortable about being so open right from the beginning. In that case the relationship could be lost from the start. The mentor may feel he is wasting his time because the protege is holding back, while the protege may resent the pressure to open up right away.
“They’ll end up finding various reasons not to make their meetings together,” he says.
Paul Gibson, vice-president of HR for Winnipeg-based furniture manufacturer Palliser, says they aren’t planning on introducing formal mentoring program any time soon. The reason? The programs he’s observed, and in some cases experienced, have not been that successful.
The programs are not necessarily flawed, but expectations are often unrealistic, he says.
Truly effective mentoring takes place over years and has to cover the entire spectrum of an individual’s growth and development. What’s more, it is difficult for someone to be completely honest if the mentor is inside the organization, he says.
“If you can’t say to someone, ‘I am not quite right for this job,’ then (that person) is probably not a mentor,” he says.
“HR may be better off finding senior people in other businesses and see if they would be willing to work as a mentor for their staff.”
Instead of a formal long-term and holistic mentoring program, Palliser is considering rolling out a short-term, skill-specific coaching program. “As we go through development plans, if we identify someone who needs to be stronger in a competency in a particular area, we’ll look for someone to mentor that particular skill for a period of time and then let (the relationship) dissolve,” he says.
William Gray, a former professor at the University of British Columbia and now president of the Victoria-based Corporate Mentoring Solutions Inc., has been helping organizations develop mentoring programs for the last 17 years. There is no question a lot of organizations are struggling to implement mentoring effectively, he says.
“Well over half of the business we get is based on organizations having tried mentoring and it didn’t work. Relationships fall apart and people just don’t meet,” he says.
Many people underestimate how complex the mentoring process is and how much work it takes to make it successful, he says. “They just think it is as easy as announcing mentoring will happen and expecting it will.”
The right people have to be chosen and training has to be provided so that all participants, both mentors and proteges, understand what is expected of them. They have to be given some tools that will help them work on identifying and developing needs and goals. “If you don’t give them some training, anything and everything can happen,” he says.
Gray makes a clear distinction between coaching and mentoring. Coaching typically refers to the development of a single skill set. So coaching is part of mentoring, but just one part. Mentoring is long term and deals with the development of the whole person, not just a single skill set, he says.
Mentoring is a different kind of relationship, he says. “It is wanting the protege to become all that they can become, and along the way you’re going to equip them with what you know and empower them to be what they can be,” he says.
“If you are not both equipping them with what you know and empowering them; if all you are doing is encouraging them to be you, that is not mentoring.”
For the rest of this year, the organizational development team at VanCity will be looking at mentoring programs and coming up with a business case and drafting a program that will fit into the VanCity context, says Pulver. For example, the employee group that recommended the company explore a formal mentoring program, did so with an important caveat, she says. “They said don’t get overly structured, because then it doesn’t fit with our culture.”
The admission process won’t be overly bureaucratic, she says. VanCity employees will be turned off by countless forms and a multi-layered approval process.
Pulver and two of her organizational design colleagues have experience creating mentoring programs in other organizations. A research analyst has also been hired to study programs in about 30 other organizations.
The greatest challenge will always be finding time, she says. As long as both people are realistic about the time they can commit, technology should make it easier, she says. After the first few face-to-face meetings, a lot of mentoring can be done via e-mail, for example. There has to be good chemistry between the two partners and ideally the learning should be reciprocal. The protege should be able to teach the mentor a thing or two as well.
Mentoring should not only be about talking and proffering advice, the mentor should be helping the protege understand how things actually work in the organization, she says.
In one of the programs Pulver worked with in another organization, a senior executive who was mentoring an administrative assistant wanted to take the protege into the executive committee meeting. Some of the committee members were uncomfortable with that, she says. There was nothing wrong with the idea, but the rest of the executive committee should have been warned beforehand, she says. “If you are going to do things outside the norm, don’t surprise people.”
Advantages of mentoring
For the partner/protege
•provides career advice and direction through greater self knowledge;
•provides accessible role models;
•increases job satisfaction, typically leading to longer tenure with the organization, thus increasing long-term benefits;
•increases self confidence and career aspirations;
•being part of a mentoring program says the organization values employees as an individual and not just a cog in a wheel;
•develops broader perspectives in junior staff;
•provides junior staff with ongoing support, encouragement and spiritual support;
•gives junior staff access to inside information and organizational dynamics;
•partners gain advice on self presentation and behaviour so that they can fit into formal culture;
•partners learn how to publicize themselves within the informal workplace culture and learn who are key decision-makers in the organization and which executives have the real power;
•improves accuracy of communication and communication network, leading to better knowledge management; and
•helps women and minority groups break through the glass ceiling or concrete barriers.
For the mentor
•exposes senior staff to new ideas;
•provides senior staff with an incentive to keep up to date;
•enables senior staff to know what is happening at more junior levels;
•provides the mentor with a different perspective on the organization;
•increases peer recognition;
•provides an opportunity to increase personal reputation by being surrounded by talented people — this will in turn attract other talented people to work with the mentor;
•provides opportunities to reflect on skills and practices;
•yields time out to update and refresh management skills and knowledge;
•provides an opportunity to challenge the accepted ways of doing things in the organization;
•presents a challenging learning experience;
•yields an opportunity to broaden understanding of the organization;
•typically results in a stimulating, rewarding and enjoyable experience;
•helps clarify a mentor’s learning needs; and
•helps senior people avoid feeling plateaued in terms of contributions — renews spiritual vigour.
Source: Peer Resources
