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Mentoring can mean benefits for all
(March 1998 Eastern Director)
The development of mentoring as a management skill can clearly reap enormous benefits, particularly in the area of interpersonal skills, Freya Williams explains.
Much has been said about mentoring recently, but surprisingly little research
has been conducted on the subject.
What is understood by the term mentoring? What are the real benefits of mentoring, how effective is it and how widespread?
The term derives from the Greek, Mentor, who Ulysses asked to take care of his son Telemachus while he went on his travels. Mentor was older and wiser, able to take care of and guide the younger, less experienced protégé.
This became the traditional mould of the mentor. Clutterbuck more recently defined mentoring as providing two broad functions:
Career-sponsorship, coaching, providing challenging work
Psychosocial – role modelling, counselling, support
To determine the effects and benefits of mentoring, I interviewed a representative sample of 40 managing directors around Cambridge and asked them about their experiences of and views on mentoring and how they would like to foster learning in their own organisations.
The survey aimed to find out firstly how much mentoring or one-on-one learning was going on in the region and secondly what was going on in these relationships that made them so valuable.
Influence
Three quarters of the respondents identified someone who had been a particular influence. In 19 cases this was one individual while 12 people cited more than one person. The majority of respondents had mentors at a senior level; business owners, directors or senior managers working in the same organisation. The remainder were lower level management or junior staff and a third of the mentors identified worked for a different organisation.
The implication is that mentoring happens as part of regular working relationships. This is supported by the finding that 11 of the mentors identified were respondents’ line managers, while another 11 developed through a professional or work related association. Some 25 respondents said they had mentored someone themselves, usually
a more junior person whose talent they had spotted! The evidence is very much of talent being picked out for special attention: an A stream mentality.
So what are the benefits from the relationship? The development of mentoring as a management skill can clearly reap enormous benefits, particularly in the area of interpersonal skills: how to communicate enthusiasm and motivation, how to develop learning in others along with thinking and problem solving skills and how to build these into the manager’s day to day role.
Expertise
The greatest benefit for the mentee was gaining knowledge and expertise directly related to their job. Other benefits were building self confidence and motivation and being able to use the mentor as a sounding board to check out ideas and get feedback.
Gaining new ideas and new ways of problem solving was also common. People benefited from relationships with more senior staff, either a line manager or close work colleague. Material benefits i.e. mentors providing a link into other resources and improving career advancement and opportunities were less marked than the personal development oriented ones.
Initial findings suggest that mentoring, in a variety of forms, plays a key role in people’s careers where influential relationships enable them to build up expertise and confidence and develop their own personal style. As managers progress through their careers, these one to one relationships become less easy to find and a need arises for a pool of people with whom they can share advice and ideas. In the latter years there has been a proliferation of non-executive directors and chairmen who can take the role of mentor to the managing director but the need for contact with peers – other people who face the same kind of challenges, problems and business issues is keen.
One provider of such contact in this area is the Directors’ Club set up by MD in association with CambsTEC. Members meet monthly to listen to a speaker who shares their own triumphs – and disasters! This generates discussion so that everyone can share experiences in an informal and relaxed environment with directors from a variety of industries.
Be clear
Clearly, mentoring is a means to an end, not an end in itself, so you need to be very clear about what you want to achieve and what your organisation and staff need, which will affect the approach you take.
The study found that directors’ needs differed from what they believed their staff needed (what their staff think they need may be different again!) but the point is that different groups of people will have different needs and so flexibility is important.
Don’t have a rigid scheme that everyone must squeeze into as this would encourage cloning not innovation. Research on what exactly happens in mentoring situations is ongoing.
If you have experienced a good or bad mentoring relationship please contact Freya on 01423 712484. We shall be conducting another survey in 2008 to find out what changes have happened in the last 10 years!
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