The Complete Guide to Mentoring

How to Design, Implement and Evaluate Effective Mentoring Programmes

Hilarie Owen

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780749461157
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Mentoring is a powerful tool in the development of talent within any organization. Experienced colleagues develop the skills, capabilities and confidence of more junior staff, who will go on to contribute to, and drive the success of, the organization. The Complete Guide to Mentoring is your step-by-step guide to implementing a successful mentoring programme in your organization. Packed with high-profile interviews, case studies and questionnaires, it includes a wealth of practical advice on every aspect of the design, fulfilment and assessment of a mentoring scheme. Learn how to set up an effective mentoring programme, develop the knowledge and skills you and your team need to run a programme, assess the time and cost implications and evaluate the impact of your programme. The Complete Guide to Mentoring is the essential toolkit for anyone who wants to create and run mentoring programmes, whether for a large or small organization, with confidence and success.

Chapter One

Introduction to mentoring

The Complete Guide to Mentoring is a toolkit for all those who are looking to find out more about mentoring, whether you are seeking a mentor, want to be a mentor or, in particular, you are interested in setting up an in-house mentoring programme.

For the last decade much has been written about coaching and there are many individuals today who offer their coaching services. Here, the focus is on mentoring, a topic that is even more relevant today.

Why is mentoring needed today?

We live in a very fast-changing world with chaotic and unexpected events. One of these was the global financial crisis that will have long-term financial repercussions for private and public organizations as well as individuals. To deal with and flourish in today’s world, what is needed at individual, team and organizational levels is wisdom and judgement that goes beyond processes and policies. Our future depends on the wisdom and judgement of our society.

Wisdom is attained through life experience if a person has the ability to learn from experience. Extracting insight from experience is an ability much needed in business and government because working professionals so often have to face uncertainty and complexity on a daily basis for which there is no practical guidebook. Instead, decision makers have to rely on judgement.

Wisdom, at individual and organizational levels, is made up of curiosity and willingness to learn about one’s environment. It is through questioning and challenging the assumptions that we take for granted that different worldviews and perspectives enable us to gain wisdom. In other words, we grow as individuals through engaging with the world, changing and being changed by it. But there is a danger – a cliff we are heading towards. Different people call it different things: an ecological cliff; an over-population cliff; an obese cliff; a fundamentalism cliff; or a banking and financial cliff. Someone who has had to explore why we are all walking towards the cliff is a senior officer at the United Nations. He concluded at a conference:

I’ve dealt with many different problems around the world, and I’ve concluded that there’s only one real problem: over the past one hundred years, the power that technology has given us has grown beyond anyone’s wildest imagination, but our wisdom has not. If the gap between our power and our wisdom is not redressed soon, I don’t have much hope for our prospects.

(Senge et al, 2005: 187)

Organizations recruit graduates hoping they will be the leaders of tomorrow but studies show there is a skills gap that needs addressing. One of the studies by consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton found that business graduates including MBA students are better than other graduates at: action, goal-setting, information analysis, information gathering, quantitative skills, theory and technology. However, these graduates were critically poor at helping others, using initiative, leadership, problem solving, relationships and sense making. In addition, almost three-quarters of female students on MBAs said the course forced them to become someone other than themselves to survive and succeed. Therefore, how relevant is an MBA today?

Is business education a factor in the business scandals of the last ten years? Booz and Company describe what business schools have been teaching as a ‘rules-plus-analytics’ model. They explain the model applies to the rules governing corporate behaviour as constraints to be overcome and analytical tools to work within or around these rules for the purpose of winning. Booz and Company ague: ‘This model emphasises impersonal aggressiveness in which managers walk as close to the legal and ethical line as possible – even crossing over it when they expect they won’t get caught’ (Booz and Company, 2008).

In addition, they suggest, it is often only when the performance of a group of employees is not meeting the expectations of the senior executives that serious attention is given to learning and development in their strategic planning. This is no longer sufficient.

Today, we need individual and organizational wisdom, judgement, leadership and responsibility to move forward, progress and learn from the past. This is why we need mentoring in organizations today. An overconfident person or organization assumes stability, whereas wisdom assumes complexity. Mentoring is a powerful process for making sustainable progress based on the positive partnership of two people. It can be used for a multitude of reasons:

• preparing to take up a new role;
• support for the first year as a school head;
• as part of graduate or high potential development schemes;
• succession planning;
• as part of addressing diversity;
• support for business owners;
• developing the top team.

The purpose of this book is to share the experience of others and provide a practical toolkit for those interested in mentoring as a way to progress. This includes providing specific guidelines for assessing the need for such an initiative in an organization as well as designing and implementing it.

Mentoring can begin in school, and using a mentor has helped many young people. There is a difference between a parent giving advice and an external mentor guiding a young person. To begin with, the young person tends to listen to someone who doesn’t have authority over them. At the same time, a mentor can be objective and not emotionally attached to the young person.

Likewise, in the workplace, a person is often more likely to listen to a mentor who is not their line manager and feel they can be more open and honest with someone who isn’t so close to them. Mentoring can help career development and succession planning. This in itself is going to be vital over the next five years as the vast number of ‘baby boomers’ leave organizations, taking with them knowledge, technical skills, understanding of organizational culture and politics, experience and sometimes wisdom, leaving fewer people to replace them.

Another reason for having a mentor is when a person takes on a new role or challenge and has to get to grips with the reality and deal with the problems very quickly. They need support, just as we all do, especially when the challenges are mammoth.

Therefore, mentoring is an effective way to develop talent in organizations. It is an effective way to address the issue of succession planning. Mentoring supports and supplements other learning and development initiatives. During the process both mentor and mentee learn and grow. Mentoring addresses gender and diversity issues with proof that women with mentors move up the organization more quickly. Finally, mentoring is a very cost-effective way of developing people with no room hire, no cost of a trainer or outside consultant and no excessive time off.

In fact, mentoring:

• is a very powerful way of helping people make significant personal transitions;
• addresses current issues for the individual learner;
• supports self-development and career management;
• develops two people for the price of one!

A real example

About eight years ago a local authority decided to set up a mentoring scheme for head teachers. A list of possible mentors was compiled to mentor new head teachers. One of these mentors was an experienced head called Jan. She had worked as a head teacher in three different schools over 16 years, had worked as a remodelling consultant (a national scheme), had been an OFSTED inspector and was now back working as a head teacher. Therefore Jan felt she had the experience to act as a mentor to new head teachers. Here she describes her role as a mentor.

I met up with a new head who was in her first headship and didn’t know where to start. There was a huge list of things to do and at my first meeting, what I thought would take a couple of hours took a whole day! We developed a priority list that included easy things as well as more challenging tasks that would make a real difference to the school. I had to ask lots of questions to help her re-prioritize. I won’t tell but ask questions to get the mentee to try and see the wood for the trees.

I asked Jan, who has since mentored several new head teachers, how she goes about it. She explained:

I first go to the school and walk and talk the school to understand the context; this enables me to see where they want to go. Very often a head teacher will know where they want to go but not how to get there. In the example above, I took her out to lunch for our second session to reflect from a distance.

Getting away and having time to reflect is an important part of mentoring and something we will look at in more depth later. Here it is clear that the ability to reflect on the mentee’s issue enables them to construct action to resolve it. Throughout the book there is an opportunity at the end of each chapter to reflect, ask deep questions, question assumptions and construct actions as a result of that reflection.

Jan continued to describe what she thought mentees are looking for:

They want a ‘critical friend’. Being a head teacher can be a lonely job and as a new head you are not sure where loyalties lie. That’s why you need an experienced head or someone who is in their second year as a head teacher and can remember their first year experience. Sometimes the challenges are so great that a mentor needs to be someone who has been a head several times.

I asked Jan what she gains from being a mentor.

I love it. It makes me reflect on my own practice and I often learn from the mentee. I love supporting new head teachers to get the best out of the school, the staff and the children. Every child deserves a good education. All I do is make the head reflect and have time to see things from different perspe...