The Business Case for Mentoring
The first recorded instance of the word “mentor” is in The Odyssey, an ancient Greek epic poem by Homer composed near the end of 8th century B.C. Athena — the Greek goddess of wisdom — takes on the form of Odysseus’ friend Mentor to impart wisdom to Odysseus’ son Telemachus. With the retelling of The Odyssey through the centuries, mentor eventually came to mean an advisor who imparts wisdom and shares knowledge with a less-experienced individual.
Mentors are often considered to be integral to individual and professional growth. And many successful companies have instituted some form of a mentoring program for their employees. In fact, according to Ireland-based MentorPitch, a company that facilitates mentoring within business and higher-education institutions, three out of four Fortune 500 companies have formal mentoring schemes in place.
Mentoring benefits
When mentoring programs are implemented, the company, the mentee and the mentor all benefit.
To begin with, mentoring is an important way to develop future leaders within a company, says John Addison, president and CEO, Addison Leadership Group, Gainesville, Ga.
“Developing talented young leaders that will move up within an organization is one of the most critically important things a business can do,” Addison states. “There is no success without successors.”
Mentoring also creates a happier workforce, Addison says. Individuals want to be recognized and singled out as important. Mentoring fosters that sense of personal development and potential.
In fact, there is a direct link between employee retention and mentoring, says Thom McElroy, a principal with New York-based Deloitte Consulting LLP and U.S. retail talent leader.
Ideally, companies should work to foster a culture of mentoring, McElroy says. Such a culture will instill values of inclusion, apprenticeship, stewardship and continuous learning within the workforce, which will benefit not just the employees, but also the company.
And when done well, mentoring benefits the mentee significantly.
A mentee is able to draw upon her mentor’s vast experience, either at the company or within the industry, when asking for advice, agrees Melissa Lamson, CEO, Lamson Consulting, Scottsdale, Ariz. That advice could deal specifically with the mentee’s job responsibilities or more broadly with how to navigate her career and grow within the company. Plus, a mentoring relationship provides a safe space for the mentee to be vulnerable, build her self-confidence to “think big” and take calculated risks, in part because she has reassurance from a trusted resource to guide her, says Ravi Gundlapalli, founder and CEO, MentorCloud, Mountain View, Calif. And a mentor will often help the mentee identify hidden strengths and weaknesses.
A mentor could also be an advocate, someone who will introduce the mentee to other individuals at the company or to other projects that might be interesting and allow her to advance her career skill set, Lamson adds.
It’s easy in a big organization to fall through the cracks, McElroy says. Mentoring keeps the mentee on the radar and gives the mentee someone to lookout for her.
Of course, mentors benefit from a mentoring relationship as well. For example, mentoring gives the mentor a pulse on the next generation of talent and creates within the mentee a commitment to the organization and to the mentor. Plus, it helps the mentor improve her personal communication skills, as she is tasked with interacting with individuals from different generations and engaging on a level that is totally different from managing, McElroy says.
By identifying talented personnel for future teams, projects and company positions, mentors ensure the success of the company, Gundlapalli says. And through the process, “reverse mentoring” often occurs. Older mentors, for example, might benefit from younger mentees by learning how to use social media effectively. A mentor also might benefit by ensuring her profession and area of expertise will continue to thrive once she leaves the company or retires.
Structured or relaxed?
Once a retailer’s management — or even the private brand team’s management — decides to move forward in implementing a mentoring program, it has two options: a formal or informal program. Formal mentoring programs are often initiated by the human resources department or by top management executives and are highly structured with specific objectives set by the company. Additionally, management is often involved in matching up mentors and mentees.
On the other hand, informal mentoring programs are less structured or unstructured; goals and objectives are set by the mentor and mentee, not the company; and top management is not involved at all with pairing up mentors and mentees.
According to Addison, companies would do best with a program that combines both formal and informal elements. If the process is too formal, it simply becomes a checklist that has no real meaning to the participants, he explains. However, if structure or reporting is not built into the process, employees won’t participate.
The company needs to support its mentoring program with resources, but as soon as it becomes a formal program, complete with forms and rules, employee support is going to wane, states Chip Bell, author of the book Managers as Mentors.
“Leaders need to treat mentoring with a change management strategy, not an HR program,” Bell advises.
One aspect of a formal mentoring program Addison does endorse is management’s involvement. If management doesn’t make mentoring a priority, it likely won’t happen within the company, he says.
He also suggests that management is best able to determine the best fit in terms of mentor and mentee, ensuring both individuals have similar personalities and skill sets.
Gundlapalli disagrees. He believes that management should be involved only to begin a culture of mentoring within a company.
McElroy, too, believes management should have limited involvement. In the short term, formal mentoring programs could be really helpful to move the company in the right direction, especially if no mentoring culture currently exists, he says. And formal programs prevent employees who want to be mentored from being overlooked, a real possibility in an informal mentoring environment.
“However, my belief is that the most enduring mentoring relationships tend to develop naturally without direction from management,” McElroy stresses. “This is because they’re founded on connection. When you truly feel a connection with an individual, you’re able to build a long-term mutually beneficial relationship with each other.”
Mentees need to be paired with a mentor with whom they have chemistry, can trust and can approach. The mentee needs to feel like their mentor is useful to them and interesting to learn from, Lamson points out.
Bell agrees.
“It’s a mistake to have staff pair up mentors with mentees,” he says. “Selection needs to be facilitated, not legislated.”
Spend time together
Once a mentoring program is established, regular meetings between mentors and mentees are tantamount to success.
“Go to lunch, go out for wine after work, make time to talk,” Addison says.
Mentoring is relationship-building, he adds. If the mentor has a bad attitude and doesn’t want to spend time with the mentee, it won’t work.
And during that time together, the onus is on the mentor to “play the devil’s advocate,” McElroy explains. Doing so will help the mentee to think outside their comfort zone.
“The trick to being a good mentor is not to answer every question a mentee has,” he says. “Instead, explore different possible answers with the mentee and teach that person how to figure out what is the best answer for them based on their situation.”
Lamson agrees, recommending that mentors act as more of a coach. More often than not, the mentee knows the answer to their problem deep down inside and simply needs someone to teach them how to access it.
If possible, a mentor should encourage her mentee to work with her to solve one of her work problems, Addison advises. This experience will provide the mentor with a different perspective on how to solve her work problem while also showing the mentee the types of issues a more senior employee faces.
Measure the results
After implementing a mentoring program, retailers will undoubtedly want to measure the results to understand its effectiveness. However, mentoring is often more about feelings than it is about data, Lamson says.
“Measure a mentoring program by employee perception,” she says. “Ask them how they feel. If they feel better, the program is working.”
She also recommends that at the beginning of the program, mentors and mentees list specific goals they each hope to achieve during their time together. Then at the end of the program, the retailer could ask them questions such as: “Did you meet your goals?” “Have you progressed in your career?” “How optimistic are you about your job/career within this organization?” “Are you willing to be a mentor/mentee again?”
Retailers could also measure the effectiveness of a mentoring program by comparing employee retention, employee satisfaction, internal promotion rates and time to proficiency between mentored and non-mentored employees, McElroy says.