Chapter 3: How Formal Should The Mentoring Programme Be?

Overview

Not long ago, a petrochemicals company asked me to examine its two pilot, high-profile mentoring schemes - why were they not working? Although launched with great enthusiasm and a considerable effort to train mentors, many of the relationships had simply never taken off. Others had faded away, often because the pair had run out of interesting things to talk about.

The problems stemmed from a variety of failings, not least insufficient clarity about roles and objectives. However, one of the most interesting results of our analysis of data gathered through focus groups was that the relationships that worked best and most often were generally those where the mentees themselves selected their mentors.

Those relationships where the mentors were effectively imposed by the organisation were less effective and less likely to continue. This distinction was particularly marked among a group of high-flyers who had one mentor of each kind - the allocated mentor being from the same general area of the business and the personally selected mentor coming from another department. Yet I know from experiences in other companies that encouraging people to select mentors entirely at their own choice leads in a high proportion of cases to relationships that deliver few, if any, benefits. Left to their own devices, people often choose someone they get on with extremely well and have known for a long time, or they approach a more senior high-flyer with a view to hanging on to their coat-tails. In the first case, although there is good rapport, there is typically very little opportunity for learning - growing pearls of learning requires at least some measure of grit in the oyster. When the chosen mentor is a high-flyer, he or she is often uninterested in helping to develop others - even if the high-flyer is interested, he or she is unable to create the necessary time.

It is as a result of this kind of contradiction in experience that emerging best practice in dealing with selection and matching centres on ‘guided choice'. This can mean providing the mentee with strong guidance on how to find and use a mentor, or it can involve giving a limited number of options, selected by the scheme co-ordinator against criteria that the mentee has provided or at least been involved in. The second of these approaches requires an existing pool of people who have volunteered and ideally been trained to be mentors.

There is, however, an even bigger conflict about mentoring, which is starting to be resolved and to which I referred in passing in Chapter 2. Put briefly, although most practitioners -both in-company and consultants - maintain that formal mentoring (ie a structured programme in which mentoring relationships are established and supported) is far more effective than informal, most academics, particularly in the USA, say that their studies show the opposite to be true. The clash between scientific observation and the experience of practitioners is not unique to mentoring - it happens in almost every aspect of endeavour - but understanding the reasons for the differences almost always stimulates a leap forward in practical implementation. And that is what is beginning to happen in mentoring right now.