Mentoring

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Mentoring is one of the those things we all know about, we all agree is a good thing, but it’s inherently grey.  It’s also quite unusual because (as we will discuss below) it’s an inherently organic process, and the more you attempt to create it artificially, the less it works.

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What is mentoring?

Workplace mentoring is an ongoing relationship between experienced and inexperienced employees, giving guidance, advice, direction and acting as a sounding board for decisions, actions and approaches.  When someone mentors another, they not only provide instruction, but also support for their future decisions; because learning complex tasks doesn’t end when you’ve been shown how, but merely starts.  The true learning is through doing, making errors, refining, adjusting, correcting and improving for next time. 

Read here for how we can get stuck on standardised, one-size-fits-all courses.

Pros of mentoring

A mentor goes beyond training and instruction, providing guidance as employees learn through doing.  By having a mentor, a learning employee has opportunities to not only gather information and knowledge, but also test, review and explore how they could or should do the tasks of their job in advance. 

Read here for how keeping people learning can keep them in the business.

In many ways it’s much harder to learn complex work without a mentor.  With any form work that is complex, nuanced, and varies from situation to situation, learning through trial and error is difficult, painful and arduous.  For most professions (e.g. doctors, nurses, lawyers, engineers, accountants, etc) some form of mentoring is built into the system, where training and learning through application is performed under the supervision of a senior practitioner.

Read here for how to be a good mentor.

Cons of mentoring

Patronage

Patronage is an old idea that is quite anathematic to current meritocratic values, where a person of power provides support to a person below them, in return for their support and obedience.   Mentoring can easily progress from a learning relationship to favouritism, and mutual expectations of support.  Once someone is an mentoree, can they disagree with their mentor? Is the relationship ‘frozen’ in a master/servant, superior/inferior, boss/worker relationship?

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Office politics

I once met a co-worker who still recounted with great pride that they had been mentored by the CEO at their last companies graduate programme, a story of up-and-comingness that did not match their reality.  I never got the full story, but I did wonder whether it was somewhat of a poison chalice for them, as office politics, perceptions of patronage from on high, and unrealistic expectations outweighed whatever they may have learnt from the CEO. Essentially, any informal relationship across levels of the organisation can shift how people behave, treat and perceive people, and situations where people are seen by who they know, instead of how good they are, is problematic.

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Only one at a time

Another important question to ask with mentoring is; who is missing out?  Who is potentially suffering a disadvantage (or perceiving one) by missing out? I may be oversimplifying it to say that a mentor can only mentor one person at a time, but it’s hard, and even 2-3 mentorees can still leave others out.

Read here for more how we can end up holding more talent than we can use.

A solution: mentoring behaviour instead of mentoring relationship

A good way to think about this, is as a verb, not a noun. The act of mentoring (to mentor), instead of a label (her mentor). Mentoring is excellent for informal learning, for passing on knowledge and understanding- if you want to foster learning within the business, mentoring is a great way to get them. But- best to avoid it getting to the point that actions become a relationship- that that person is a mentor, and this person is the mentoree.

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Does it require a formal program?

It a somewhat common practice for large organisation to have formal mentor programs, although these are less common than they were 20 years ago.  Mostly they form part of structured graduate programs, and within this context they make sense, especially where graduates are rotated throughout the functions of the business.  But a common element is for the mentor to be outside of the graduate’s reporting line, and while there are some benefits to this (protection of vulnerable employees, career advice) they also risk creating complexity political conflict.   But by far the most common point of failure is time and effort- most graduates reflect that their mentor just didn’t have time for them. 

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I wouldn’t argue that formal mentor programs aren’t of value, but I would comment that they are complex, require continuous maintenance and organisational commitment.

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A recurring theme of all of these L&D articles is; most of the time we don’t have the resources to build good L&D systems, but the good news is that learning happens with or without HR.  The same applies for mentoring- most of the time mentor relationship occur organically, and spontaneously, and we need to encourage and support this happening, and work with it.

Read here for more on the difference between Learning and learning.

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