Preparing The Company For A Mentoring Programme

How supportive is the organisational context?

An important element in designing the programme, especially in terms of the training provision and communication within the organisation, is to understand just how supportive the environment will be towards mentoring. How will mentors and mentees be perceived?

Will line managers willingly let them spend time in mentoring meetings? Are there any cultural factors, that might inhibit mentees from using the relationship appropriately?

I often use the Development Context Survey (copies of the survey can be obtained from info@clutterbuckassociates. co. uk), a generalised indicator of how positive or negative the organisational environment is towards developmental activities, along with structured interviews with potential or actual stakeholders in the programme. Whatever process they decide to use, programme co-ordinators need to gather as much insight as possible into what will enhance or undermine mentoring.

Some examples that illustrate the point include:

• A large UK-based financial services organisation found that its system of billable hours placed a major potential barrier in the way of mentors and mentees because they would effectively be penalised for spending time on the relationship during official working hours. The solution was to produce a budget line specifically for time spent on the programme and to ensure that line managers understood the importance of making this available.

• The HR function in a UK national institution insisted that it knew exactly what the likely concerns of mentors and mentees would be and saw no need to conduct any research prior to training. Subsequently, it became very clear that the organisational culture made it difficult for the mentees - newly recruited graduates - to admit that they had any issues to deal with. They soon learned that projecting confidence and competence was essential if their appointment was to be confirmed at the end of their two-year induction. The mentees also felt that senior managers, from whom the mentors were drawn, were remote and unapproachable, so they were reluctant to disturb them with any problems they did have. The net result was that most relationships never really took off.

• An engineering company assumed that women managers would welcome a mentoring programme aimed specifically at them. Persuaded to do some initial research, it discovered that many of the women felt that labelling the programme as a women's initiative would devalue it, and that they would be less likely to take part.

Ensure top management commitment

The top management team needs to supply decisive leadership to demonstrate to the rest of the company that it considers mentoring to be a legitimate and effective method of developing and improving staff potential. Top management must support the programme verbally and materially. It must promote mentoring within the company, through speeches, letters, memoranda and articles in the company newsletter. Articles in the public media can reinforce the message greatly, because employees often take greater note of information they read in independent newspapers and magazines than they do of the same information presented in official company publications. Senior management can also attend general meetings of groups of mentoring pairs. These strategies are especially necessary if general unease, confusion, or even suspicion about the programme exists in the company.

Adapt the programme to the company's development programme

Try to fit the mentoring programme into the context of a wider framework of employee development and human resource management, and explain this framework to employees. Problems are likely to arise if the programme exists in isolation. If it seems that mentoring is the only form of career development in the company, employees may easily assume that those chosen to participate are destined automatically for senior management. The company could be accused of having a promotion system based solely on favouritism. The morale of those not on the programme would suffer appreciably. Those individuals who are on the programme may be encouraged to believe that all their chances of promotion lie in the mentoring relationship. As a result they may throw all their efforts into that area and neglect other aspects of their work. To avoid these pitfalls, mentoring should be seen as only one dimension of career development.

The company should also make sure that mentees have other opportunities to improve their skills beyond those arising within the mentoring programme. They should have access to internal or external workshops, self-development and distance-learning materials, as well as career development classes. This is to ensure that mentees can easily supplement their knowledge if the mentor's coaching is too specialised or fails to be sufficiently relevant and helpful. If the mentee is forced to rely solely on an inefficient mentor, he or she can feel frustrated and limited by the relationship. For people from disenfranchised groups and/or minorities, the company may wish in addition to make available some form of assertiveness training. At a recent round-table discussion in Washington (at the Linkage Coaching and Mentoring Conference, July 2001), the point was made quite strongly by some participants that in order to participate fully in mixed-gender mentoring training, or in cross-gender mentoring relationships, many women benefited from help in learning how to put their own views and perceptions more forcefully.

Ensure commitment and participation

Ensure that participation is voluntary. Mentoring demands time and effort, so the essential ingredient is commitment. When a company requests staff to volunteer to be mentors, it should make sure that it emphasises how demanding the relationship is. The programme co-ordinator should talk to all mentor applicants before making the final decision. If an assessment centre approach is used to select mentees, consideration should be given to designing an assessment centre for mentors, too.

Potential mentors should be informed of problems and challenges and what they should expect of the relationship. Some companies give all new mentors and mentees the chance to hear from existing mentors of the pitfalls and pleasures mentoring can bring. They also explore the mentee's view through the eyes of previous participants. The co-ordinator should also attempt to discover any ambivalence the mentor may feel about his or her commitment.

Ensure that support systems are in place

The most important of the support systems required are:

• clear information about the purpose of the programme and who is eligible for it

• some basic information about mentoring and how to apply for the programme - the Department for Employment and Education, for example, has an extensive website on its intranet

• a systematic, transparent system for matching mentors and mentees - the European Mentoring Centre can provide up-to-date information on software available

• a well-focused training programme for both mentor and mentee

• some form of mutual support mechanism by which mentors can meet from time to time to share experience and receive further advice (along the lines of supervision in counselling, although not necessarily so structured); at London Borough of Ealing, mentors meet in small groups with an experienced facilitator and mentor trainer who works with them and helps them learn from the issues they have encountered as mentors.

Some companies, such as Procter & Gamble, have supported diversity mentoring schemes with newsletters and discussion sheets aimed at stimulating dialogue between mentor and mentee. Other companies feel that most people will rapidly establish their own agenda.

Ensure an acceptance of the time involved

Make sure that everyone understands the amount of time commitment involved. As part of the preparation of the mentor, the mentee and the mentee's manager must be devoted to establishing just how much of each person's time will be taken up by the scheme. This time has to be planned for, regular meetings scheduled and a timetable established for any project work agreed.

Two key questions that must be asked are:

• How disruptive to the normal work of these people will the time commitment be?

• How valuable will this time and effort be in achieving the objective of developing the mentee?

Two useful ground rules help to put the time issue into perspective:

• If you meet less than once a quarter, you do not have a relationship (it is just an acquaintance); if you meet much more than once a month, the mentor is probably doing the line manager's job.

• Ideally, meetings should last 60-90 minutes. Less than this, it is difficult to address issues in real depth. More than two hours and you are probably going round the houses. It can be good practice to put an extra half-hour into the diary to allow for those occasions when a really crucial issue comes to the surface towards the end of the scheduled time.

Demystify the mentoring programme

Demystify the mentoring programme for those who are not involved. The methods and objectives of the programme should be explained clearly, setting out and emphasising the benefits to the organisation as a whole. If it is decided to establish only a small number of mentoring pairs as a pilot at the beginning of a programme, the organisation should explain to applicants not included that they will have an opportunity to reapply in the future.

Ensure confidentiality

Confidentiality is essential if the mentee is to open up to the mentor to produce the kind of frank relationship necessary for success. BP Chemicals ensures that all exchanges are covered by a rule of confidentiality so that the mentee can speak to the mentor as a trusted friend. One mentor comments:

The mentor should be completely aside from the line of work. It is important that total honesty and openness can be displayed, and often mentees feel wary if they do not have the distance they would like.

Confidentiality in mentoring is rarely absolute. Leaving aside the issue of legal obligations (eg becoming an accessory after the fact), different organisations have different expectations of the level of confidentiality that can apply. At the Audit Commission, the mentor is obliged to report any indication of financial misconduct, for example. At a City financial services company, top management has been careful to draw the distinction between privacy (being able to talk about issues in a relationship of trust) and confidentiality (the expectation that nothing said can be discussed outside the relationship without mutual agreement).

Clearly, the less confidence the mentee (let alone the mentor) has that what he or she says will remain between them alone, the more reluctant the mentee will be in speaking openly of his or her feelings and concerns. Said one mentee recently:

My line manager and my mentor play golf together every Sunday. There are things I'd like to explore with the mentor about how to tackle some of my manager's behaviours, but I'm never sure how much I dare say. If my manager thought I was criticising him behind his back, I'd have a real problem. As it is, twice now they have both made much the same suggestion to me about an issue I've brought up, which makes me suspicious that they have been discussing me.

Although issues of broken confidentiality are remarkably rare in mentoring, concerns over confidentiality remain one of the biggest limiting factors on relationships. Making the ground rules clear and trying, wherever possible, to avoid mentor and line manager being too close operationally or personally, are obvious practical measures to take.

Some of the engineering institutes have used mentoring for years as a means of assisting people on their route to chartered engineer. Most expected the mentor to carry out some form of assessment of the mentee, but this practice is gradually being dropped, not least because it introduced a dynamic into the relationship that made it difficult for the mentee to seek anything but technical advice - much of which was more readily available from other sources. To enrich the relationships and help build rounded professionals, the Institute of Electrical Engineers has largely divorced the measurement processes from the mentoring process.