Chapter 11: Phases of the Mentoring Relationship

Overview

In an experiment with several hundred HR professionals a few years ago, I asked people who they found to be their most frequent and most intensive sources of learning at work. The results, which have since been replicated with other groups of employees in a variety of circumstances, were stark - the most frequent learning came from peers, the most intensive from mentors. Line managers scored near the bottom of the pile on both criteria.

In the traditional view of mentoring, the relationship with the mentor influences the career and personal development of a young employee. In the early stages of his or her career the young employee's identity, career aspirations and business relationships are forming. The junior must learn new technical, political and interpersonal skills. Throughout this process, the mentor relationship is often the most important vehicle for stimulating and assisting his or her development. The mentor:

• offers friendship

• acts as a role model

• accepts and confirms the mentee's notions about his or her own identity

• provides support and encouragement

• gives confidence and a feeling of competence.

The mentor also finds that a relationship with a younger employee answers certain of his or her own psychological needs. The mid-career stage can be difficult for many managers and executives as they find there is little chance of any further growth or advancement. The mentor's career may be in danger of stagnation if he or she feels locked into a pattern of repetition and uniformity. Entering a mentoring relationship at that stage of the mentor's career provides refreshing new challenges.

Mentors can redirect their energies into a stimulating and creative role. Mentoring demands a flexible and individual approach rather than applying habitual, well-used formulae. As a result, the mentor finds new self-respect as he or she recognises he or she has valuable experiences and knowledge to pass on to the mentee.

This is not necessarily the case with mentoring for people in other circumstances. For example, an executive mentee is less interested in an external mentor's knowledge of the business or the sector than in the ability to help the mentee structure and explore issues for himself or herself.

For the moment, however, let's stick with the traditional model. This is based upon a major study into the nature of the mentoring process, conducted in the early 1980s by Katherine Kram (1983), then Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Boston University's School of Management. Kram attempted to discover the significance of the relationship for the mentor and the mentee, and how mentoring influenced each party's career and self-development. She also tried to establish whether mentoring relationships share any similar characteristics.

Kram conducted her survey in a public utility company of 15, 000 employees in the north-east region of the USA. She studied 18 mentoring pairs using in-depth interviews. The young mentees' ages ranged between 26 and 34, while the mentors' ages ranged between 39 and63. The relationships varied considerably in duration, but Kram found that they were on average about five years long. Each relationship generally progressed through four distinct stages.

In the remainder of this chapter we explore each of those phases - initiation (the start), the middle period, dissolving the relationship, and restarting - alongside the slightly different evolution observed in developmental mentoring. Figure 13 outlines these differences.

Figure 13: The phases of relationship development: a comparison of US and European approaches

Kram's study was based on sponsorship mentoring and a definition that included both off-line and boss-subordinate relationships, so its general applicability to developmental mentoring is suspect. The phases she identifies ring broadly true, however, even if the conclusions drawn are not the same.