The Case To Top Management

Every company needs some form of career development programme to produce a succession of motivated, upward-moving employees. Even employees who are destined to remain at the same level may need career development as the jobs they are in change or become obsolete. Managers with high potential should identify and improve their skills, set career goals and know how to achieve those goals in the most practical and efficient way. Conventional career development courses provide some of the answers, but all too often fail to provide adequate follow-up. The results, too, are often hard to define. Schemes involving selection by assessment centres of high-flyers or frequent job rotation to gain wide experience probably offer the nearest thing to tangible results, but are extremely expensive, not least because at each change the young person has to start again at the beginning of the learning cycle of the new job.

Leaving career development solely to managers, although cheaper, tends to be singularly ineffective. A manager may lack the ability to recognise a potential high-flyer or, if he or she does, be reluctant to lose that employee by counselling him or her to move to another area of the company. Managers who are unavailable, uncommitted, or who dislike particular subordinates can effectively block the career paths of talented employees and prevent them from realising their potential. Diversity objectives also tend to be marginalised, unless there is a structured programme to promote and monitor them.

A mentoring programme, as a formal method of recognising talent in a company, is a viable alternative to both these approaches. It can be carried out in tandem with traditional career development methods and has reasonably good predictability in its results. It may be run for as long as the employee benefits from it. As in many other relationships, both mentee and mentor have to work hard to make it succeed; both can draw substantial benefits.

Mentoring can work in most organisations, regardless of size, culture or market sector. It can communicate to employees far more fully the complexity of procedures and the unique nature of the company than any formal training course, induction booklets or company manual.

Mentoring enhances the abilities of both the mentor and mentee, so the organisation gains through increased efficiency. Companies with formal, longstanding mentoring programmes claim tangible increases in productivity and efficiency. Intangible benefits include improved staff morale, greater career satisfaction and swifter getting up to speed when mentored managers are inserted into a new job.

Another significant impetus behind mentoring is the cost - not in cash terms (mentoring is not a cheap alternative when you take into account the value of management time) - but in saving on expensive off-site courses which take employees away from productive activity for weeks on end.

The primary rewards to a company of a mentoring programme are:

• easier recruitment and induction

• improved employee motivation

• the management of the corporate culture

• succession planning

• improved communications

• staff retention.

Easier recruitment and induction

A formal mentoring programme eases the sometimes difficult process of assimilating new recruits. Companies such as BAe Systems and National Grid, for example, have found graduate induction has become less of an ordeal since they began mentoring. Enthusiasm has been productively channelled, and graduates are taking on greater responsibility as their commitment grows.

Most staff turnover occurs during the first six to 12 months with a new employer, and a major cause is inability to adjust rapidly enough. Assigning a mentor to a new arrival helps overcome the counterproductive problems of culture shock and the uncertainty most people feel as they find their feet in the new environment. Employees become productive more quickly and are likely to stay with the company longer.

Mentoring also cultivates in the mentee an increased sense of commitment and loyalty to the organisation. The mentor is the mediator between the mentee and the company. Through close interaction with the mentee, the mentor creates a personal atmosphere in what might otherwise seem a faceless bureaucratic organisation. The mentee receives through the mentor a positive perception of the company. The mentee can be made to feel that he or she is participating in the inner operations of the company, and this in turn generates a closer identification with the organisation's goals.

Many companies experience difficulties in attracting the right kind of graduates, even in times of severe unemployment. Even top financial services companies in the City of London are finding that graduates - and especially those with advanced degrees - turn down employers who do not offer a mentoring programme. A mentoring programme can be a significant inducement for graduates to join less glamorous firms or industries because it demonstrates commitment to management development and staff retention. It is particularly attractive if it offers a fast track to middle management.

Improved employee motivation

Mentoring can help reduce managerial and professional turnover at other critical stages, too. Young, ambitious people often undergo a period of frustration and impatience when they realise their progress up the company career ladder is slower than they initially expected. If mentees have a mentor who is taking an active interest in their career and who explains the reasons for and ways round current blockages, they are more likely to persevere. The mentor helps them understand and recognise the long-term plans the company has for them, and helps the mentee make the most of the learning experiences inherent in the current job. In this way mentoring lessens the threat that other companies may lure away promising young employees with offers of speedier career advancement.

A mentoring relationship also motivates the middle and senior managers involved and can be a valuable means of delaying ‘plateauing'. A manager is less likely to retire mentally in the job if he or she is constantly faced with fresh challenges arising from a mentoring relationship. Mentors are forced to clarify and articulate their own ideas about the company's organisation and goals in order to explain them to their mentees. They may feel they have to improve their own abilities to justify the mentees' respect. Cultivating potential in the company becomes a significant opportunity for the mentor to demonstrate that the old dog is still capable of learning and showing new tricks. As a result, mentors may find new purpose and interest in their jobs.

The management of the corporate culture

In the original edition I titled this section ‘A stable corporate culture'. Almost every mentoring programme I examined then had as part of its objectives passing on the nuances of the corporate culture. In the intervening years the emphasis has changed dramatically. Instead of preserving cultures, companies are desperately trying to change them. This poses a number of problems - not least that it makes it even more difficult to identify mentors with the ‘right' values.

Mentor and mentee in an effective developmental relationship are able to explore the differences between espoused corporate values and actual behaviour. At the same time, the mentor helps to clarify in the mentee's mind which aspects of the culture are fixed and not open to challenge, and which are open for dialogue. At one of the world's largest and most successful merchant banks, for example, new recruits soon learn that near-obsessive honesty is an immutable part of the culture, but that maintaining a work-life balance (on a par with integrity in the corporate values statement) is honoured more often in the breach. The mentee is able to use the mentor as a role model for selected aspects of the culture, while the mentor is able to use the mentee's constructive challenge to inform the continuing senior-level debate on how the culture should evolve.

Bringing mentors together from time to time to continue their skills development and review relationship progress (within the bounds of confidentiality) has proved valuable in changing how the organisation tackles important issues relating to culture.

For example: an international IT services company held as a basic assumption about how people's careers should evolve that they should move as early as possible into positions of junior supervision and thence to manage small projects, until they began to climb the management ladder. The mentors revealed, however, that a significant proportion of the workforce just wanted to become better and better techies. One of the main reasons talent was leaving the company was that these people felt the culture was incompatible with their needs. The result was that the company introduced a dual-path career system.

A financial services company had stifled discussion about work-life balance issues for years. With the introduction of a mentoring programme, people had an opportunity to open up about their anger in respect of the long hours culture. Suddenly, top management could no longer pretend the problem did not exist, and it committed to making changes happen.

Succession planning

An increasingly common benefit reported by larger companies is an improvement in succession planning. Widespread mentoring, especially where the duration of formal relationships is limited to one or two years, ensures that senior managers are familiar with the strengths, weaknesses and ambitions of a relatively large pool of more junior talent.

Improved communications

In a traditional senior to junior mentoring relationship, the mentee's unique position in the organisation can aid informal communications because he or she straddles several levels. For example, through the relationship with the mentor the junior management mentee has access to and is accepted by middle management. At the same time he or she is accepted in the lower managerial levels. Because the mentee is familiar with the language and mannerisms of both, he or she can efficiently communicate each group's ideas and opinions to the other. Rich informal communication networks improve productivity and efficiency in a company since they lead to more action, more innovation, more learning, and swifter adjustment to changing business needs.

It can be lonely at the top. The chance to pass information to lower levels of management restores interdependence between management levels and eases the flow of ideas and information. This special communications network also facilitates easier working of other areas of management development.

Improved communications between headquarters and the field has been a significant result in a number of mentoring schemes. In one UK public sector organisation, headquarters was trying to rein in the regional barons, who had virtually declared independence and who actively discouraged their people from getting too close to headquarters employees. Headquarters had at the same time allowed itself to become somewhat aloof and disconnected. Deliberately pairing mentors and mentees across this divide increased understanding and established a quality of dialogue that overcame most of the hostilities.

Mentoring can sometimes benefit an organisation in unexpected ways, too. In one company a mentee was being mentored with the ultimate objective of helping him leave. A spokesman explained:

This highly talented individual has gone as far as is possible in this company. We have no appropriate position for him, so we are grooming him to take over a small corporation outside this company. In the meantime, for the three to five years that he stays with us, we benefit from his productivity and enthusiasm. In the future we will have a very useful ally.

A similar case arose in the north-west region of ICI's engineering department. The company explains:

A sponsored mechanical engineering student began training with us and met her mentor for about three hours on her first day. Two weeks later, she left us and decided to go up to university, forsaking her engineering ambitions. During this time the mentor had provided support, primarily in a counselling mode, to a person living away from home for the first time, in a strange environment. He helped her rethink her ambitions and come to a decision on her future.

The most recent large-scale study of mentoring programmes in the UK (Industrial Society, 1995) found that the most common intention behind introducing a mentoring programme was to provide help and encouragement for those taking qualifications (56 per cent), followed by familiarising new recruits with the organisation (50 per cent), ‘providing growth for any employee who requests a mentor' (46 per cent), developing senior managers (31 per cent) and fast-tracking (31 per cent). A handful of schemes addressed issues of equal opportunities.

Another study, this time from North America (CMSI, 2001), asked programme co-ordinators how satisfied they were with the return on investment from mentoring. Some 52 per cent said they were moderately satisfied, and 29 per cent said they were highly satisfied.

Improved retention of employees

Keeping the good people you have is increasingly being regarded as a core competitive advantage. In the war for talent, any reduction in employee turnover is a major benefit - and mentoring has been shown to play a major positive role in retention.

A key indicator is ‘intention to quit'. US studies of employees in large companies indicate that 35 per cent are thinking of leaving within the next 12 months. However, among those who have a mentor, the figure falls to 16 per cent. When it comes to actual resignations, the figures are even more startling. In the finance division of SmithKline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline), staff turnover in 1999 was 27 per cent - except among people who had a mentor, where it was 2 per cent! Some allowance must be made in these figures for sample bias (people who have given up on the company are unlikely to seek a mentor within it), but that is likely only to have had a minor effect.

Similarly, Allied Irish Banks was losing a quarter of its annual intake of 200 graduates within the first 12 months each year. The only change made to the recruitment and induction programme was to introduce a mentoring process. The turnover rate dropped from 25 per cent to 8 per cent.

With graduates, opportunity to improve retention appears to lie in the transition period between the end of their formal induction and getting settled into their first supervisory job. Many mentoring schemes stopped when the graduate induction stopped. Good practice now seems to be to carry on for six months plus, to bridge this period of uncertainty and relatively low self-confidence.

Surveys in a number of countries indicate that people, who are in a mentoring relationship, are less than half as likely to be thinking of changing employers.

Other organisational benefits

The benefits described thus far are relatively generic, but in most cases organisations will have very specific goals for introducing and maintaining a mentoring programme. For example, a firm may have a very strong need to tackle diversity issues by opening up access to disadvantaged groups. Or it may wish to deal with the problems of stress and absenteeism by providing a safety valve for people's concerns. Other goals have included:

• helping ‘invisible' people in finance become better known and demonstrate their abilities

• supporting managers in a bureaucratic culture to become more commercially minded

• establishing a professional development network for members of an engineering association

• helping entrepreneurs grow their management abilities in line with the demands of their businesses

• raising overall appraisal scores across a division

• helping new project teams gel more rapidly, so they can achieve the assigned task ahead of the competition

• increasing creativity and the quality of risk-taking.

Community organisations will have different goals again - from helping young people stay at school to helping the long-term unemployed find permanent work. The one common factor we can find across all the goals of successful mentoring programmes is that they aim to achieve an important organisational objective by assisting people to achieve their potential.