Making Enterprise-wide Mentoring Successful

Don’t establish a mentoring program just because it is a good business practice. Develop a mentoring program based on solid business goals such as increasing diversity or making your organization a better place to work. Here are ways to ensure mentoring is successful enterprise-wide:

Provide new perspectives. Encourage older workers to stop defining themselves in terms of their job titles and start reflecting on skills they have built, and knowledge that they have amassed. Today, jobs are about more than just upward mobility. Mentors can share their vision and career histories so that younger employees understand what they can learn through lateral career moves and on the job experience.

Share information. Mentoring can help employees quickly learn about other levels within the organization. Says one mentor at a Fortune 1000 company, “As a leader, it has helped me to see the obstacles we inadvertently put in people’s development.” Mentoring can also help mature employees learn from and understand other generations. For instance, younger employees can help baby boomers with technical skills or provide marketing insights about a new generation of buyers.

Build skills. Mature workers benefit from being mentors by having the chance to learn more about and practice listening and coaching – skills which require maturity, confidence and experience to fully employ.

Reduce generational conflict. Most frequently reported generational conflicts are differing expectations regarding work hours, certain behaviors at work (e.g., use of cell phones), and acceptable dress. Another common issue is feeling that co-workers from other generations do not respect one another. Organizations can reduce generational friction with effective communication, team building, mentoring and recognizing the efforts of all workers.

Enable knowledge transfer. As older employees retire, they take with them volumes of experience and information. Good working relationships between older and younger generations are critical in ensuring that this institutional knowledge is not lost as mature workers retire. The greater the mix of generations in an organization’s workforce, the more important knowledge transfer becomes and the more powerful intergenerational synergy can be. Mentors can often manage, explain and process this information differently and at times more effectively than managers.

In our experience, we have seen older employees are reluctant to mentor younger employees because they are afraid that once they share their knowledge, they will become extraneous and lose their jobs. In fact, in today’s fast-paced business environment, it is the SMEs (subject matter experts) who can capably and articulately share what they know who are the most valuable to their organizations.
Reward, mature employees for mentoring. To entice experienced employees to become mentors, organizations should reward and recognize them for their contributions.

Talk up mentoring in meetings, in speeches, in newsletters, in performance appraisal discussions and include mentoring in corporate awards programs. And, most important, don’t replace mature mentors with their mentees before they retire or mentors will quickly conclude that being a mentor is a very bad idea.

Ask mature employees about someone who enabled them to succeed. In one study of people who had experienced effective mentoring, half of them said the mentoring experience “changed my life.” Those are powerful words. It is equally powerful to know that you were the person who changed someone else’s life.

Share mentoring results. Study after study in which mentors and mentees are asked how satisfied they are with the relationship report that the mentors are more satisfied. It just feels good to help someone else. Says one mentor; “It has been rewarding to be able to help people at critical stages of their career by helping them analyze where they are in their careers. Mentoring gets people in the right groove for long term career success.”
-Anshumali Saxena www.soilindia.net