Organisational Issues


Poor planning and preparation

Unclear programme objectives, failure to gain the public endorsement of senior managers, and under-resourcing the programme are all common failings.

A division of a large US-based multinational insisted that its operations around the world all instituted mentoring programmes for a particular group of employees before the year end, a mere four months away. The number of relationships established would be measured and ‘heads would roll' if the policy were not implemented enthusiastically. Of course, local senior management responded on the hoof, informing several hundred people in the UK alone that they would be mentor or mentee to someone else. Because no one knew what they were doing and there had been no time to gain participants' buy-in, most of the relationships got off to a rocky start. As long as it measured only the number of assigned pairings, the US head office was happy. Only when it started to look at the frequency and quality of meetings did it realise that all but a small handful of the relationships were anything more than a sham.

Poor clarity of role

Failure to distinguish between the roles of the line manager and the mentor leads to confusion and sometimes to conflict between mentor and line manager. Expecting the mentor to take part in appraising the mentee can also be confusing, on both sides, and lead the mentee to be very cautious about what he or she says. However, it is possible to be quite ingenious in managing this kind of potential conflict of role.

At Perot Systems, where most employees work in multiple teams, there is often no single stable point of supervision to carry out an appraisal. Instead, the individual's mentor - or in some cases, the individual - gathers appraisal feedback from a mixture of the mentee's peers, project team leaders and internal customers. This information becomes neutral information - not the mentor's opinion - which the mentor helps the mentee deal with. In this way, there is no need for the mentee to ‘play up' to the mentor.

Failure to set and measure clear outcomes

Many schemes get introduced because someone thinks it would be generally a good thing. So it might, but in the absence of clear expected outcomes, the scheme may easily fall into disrepute as just another talking-shop.

Although mentoring may not involve a lot of direct cost, it does require a lot of valuable management time. Top management is justified in asking for some kind of demonstrable return on the investment. Schemes that build in relevant measurement from the start arguably have a better chance of securing and retaining top management support.

Too little or too much formality

A mentoring scheme aimed at helping children from deprived backgrounds develop literacy and numeracy skills initially required every mentor and mentee to complete a six-page detailed report after each meeting. It had not occurred to the organisers that the target audience of mentees might be intimidated by all this. Getting the balance right between formality and informality is not easy. There has to be enough formality to create a supportive framework, in which relationships can flourish, but enough informality for each mentoring pair to develop its own relationship as it feels fit. Paradoxically, the better trained the mentors and mentees are, the more confident both they and the organisation can feel in allowing relationships to develop in their own way.

Failure to quality-control the mentor pool

It is now generally regarded as good practice to insist that mentoring relationships will only be sanctioned and supported by the organisation if the mentor and mentee have both attended at least a minimal level of training. Some companies use the mentor training sessions as subtle assessment centres for the mentors - people who demonstrate a complete unsuitability for the role can have their cards marked and, unless somebody specifically asks for them as a mentor, will never be drawn from the pool. These companies also take the view that anyone who volunteers as a mentor should be allowed to attend the training. First, some of the skills and techniques may rub off on them and be used in their dealings with their direct reports. Second, they may decide to become a mentee rather than a mentor. On several occasions when the latter has occurred, the person concerned has grown in the role of mentee - using his or her own mentor as a role model for his or her own attempts at acquiring better developmental skills - and eventually become an effective mentor.

Where any old manager, selected by seniority rather than developmental competence, is placed into the role, it requires a strong mentee to demand and obtain the kind of deep dialogue he or she needs. The relationship may also require a considerable input of time by the programme co-ordinator, which might be better spent elsewhere. A curious logic often operates in large corporations, however: ‘We are a world-class company, employing highly intelligent, world-class people. So all of our senior managers should by definition be good at developing other people. So they should all become mentors. ' If all promotions were truly made because managers were good at the people skills, this logic might - just - stand up. But the reality is that managers still primarily get promoted for task achievement and organisational ability, rather than for their skills at developing others. Once a very senior person takes on the title of mentor, there may be little appetite from the mentee, the scheme co-ordinator or anyone else to tell him or her that he or she is not doing a good job. The mentor bumbles along in blissful ignorance, the mentee feels trapped and, if there are enough people in the same situation, a deep cynicism about the whole approach establishes itself.

These managers may also help to perpetuate stereotypes both in a company's management style and in its culture. Ideas and values that senior executives pass down to mentees may in reality be obsolete or irrelevant. If these values are too vigorously imposed, junior employees are discouraged from finding their own methods and instead use old solutions for new problems. As a result, the company becomes entrenched in the past and loses its ability to react quickly to the demands of the present.

Being too elitist

Some programmes for high-flyers deliberately set out to be elitist. They want participants to recognise that being chosen as a mentee is a mark of the company's confidence in their potential. There is a downside, however - what about those left out? Since most organisations have a pyramidal structure, it follows that there will always be some junior managers who have a mentor and some who do not. There are just not enough mentors to go round, so a company faces the constant danger of alienating failed candidates.

Unfortunately, the resentment and disappointment felt by failed applicants can outweigh the benefits that successful candidates receive from the programme. A junior who does not gain entry all too often believes the selectors' decision to be based on his or her own personal limitations, rather than due to a lack of programme resources. He or she believes that it is an unspoken statement by the company indicating that he or she lacks the ability to fill important positions in the future. In short, he or she has been given a vote of no confidence.

One UK company with a number of geographically spread operations invited applications for the pilot of its mentoring programme. More than 40 people applied for the 15 available places. Although the company wrote to all the unsuccessful candidates suggesting they speak to their local employee counsellor, only one did so - and she handed in her notice. The company learned that it had to:

  • make sure everyone knew the criteria for selection

  • demonstrate that mentoring was just one route to advancement among many

  • consider unsuccessful candidates' reactions at a much earlier stage.

Such negative experiences can be very damaging to a junior manager. His or her self-confidence and morale may be eroded to such an extent as to underrate his or her own ability and potential, and to lower his or her career aspirations accordingly. As a result, instead of having a motivated young employee who aims at promotion through a high standard of work, a company has an individual whose enthusiasm is curbed and who ceases to stretch his or her abilities because there seems to be no reward in doing so.

Alternatively, a failed candidate can feel resentment and bitterness as he or she sees peers receive treatment that seems ‘preferential'. ‘Favouritism' is a frequently heard complaint, as well as the accusation that peers used unfair tactics to gain a place on the programme. A mentee's friendship with a senior executive becomes ‘sucking up' or ‘crawling'. Envy and resentment from a mentee's peers can frequently hinder, or even destroy, a mentoring programme.

It is probably not possible to assure everyone that the selection process for high-flyer mentoring has been totally fair, and there will always be a few individuals who convince themselves that the programme caters only for those who are best at impressing the right people rather than those who are most able and deserving.

Being too problem-focused

When young graduates on the Bank of England's mentoring programme failed to meet their mentors as frequently as expected and failed to gather much value from the relationship, investigation showed that there were two main causes. One was a reluctance to disturb someone more senior, and obviously very busy, with their own relatively trivial issues. The other was a perception that mentors were there to help you deal with problems, rather than to help you identify and manage opportunities. These highly intellectually capable young men and women perceived that it was not career-enhancing behaviour to admit weaknesses to anyone else in the organisation, even within a relationship of confidentiality. Greater clarity at the beginning about how mentors could add value to their personal development and career planning might have overcome some of these problems, along perhaps with a deferment of the programme until they had been with the bank long enough to develop their own ideas about how they would use a mentor and what sort of mentor would best suit them.

Power alignments

Primarily a problem of sponsorship mentoring, the issue of power underlies a whole raft of common problems with mentoring schemes. For example, by assigning a mentor to a mentee in a different department or a different division, a company changes the nature of its informal structure. Close relationships that extend beyond the normal business restraints and that cut across the barrier of status and position mean that new alliances are formed between junior and senior employees. A company that has run a mentoring programme for several years may have the additional power nexus of a former mentor and a mentee, now on the same organisational rung, actively promoting and assisting each other. While this means the informal communications of a company are strengthened, it can also lead to an increase in corporate politics.

One of the objectives of the mentoring programme is at least partly to overcome the unfairness of the informal old boy networks. Unless the company is vigilant, there is a very real danger that instead of making the system more open and fair, the scheme may simply create new closed networks. If covert sources of information are available only to the chosen few within mentor-mentee relationships, only the initiated know how to gain and use company resources effectively. Through this, mentors and mentees can form a small yet powerful group capable of operating through and beyond the company's formal positions of power.

Before BP Chemicals began its mentoring programme, doubters thought it would interfere with the authority and skills of the line manager and would set up a network independent of management control. In practice, these fears proved groundless, to the extent that the pilot plant's managers changed from sceptics to enthusiasts.

Failure to make it clear from the outset that the young person is still primarily responsible to his or her immediate boss and not to his or her mentor can create serious power-play problems. The mentor has to guard against creating situations where the mentee uses his or her special relationship to bypass the authority of his or her boss. At the same time, the mentor must not override the mentee's boss, other than in exceptional cases. Unfortunately, obscuring the company's command structure can happen all too easily. Because the mentor and mentee are adhering to a different system of loyalty and authority, they cut across the recognised formal hierarchy. An invisible chain of command can emerge subtly to challenge the established one, resulting in confusion, conflict and bitterness.

The mentee's immediate superior can often be placed in an uncomfortable and difficult position by all this. A brittle relationship can develop between the mentee, the manager and the mentor if the manager is completely excluded from the relationship, perhaps only learning about it by accident. The manager in this situation feels threatened and frequently resents the mentor's behaviour, interpreting it as open interference. If the mentor overrides the manager's authority, the latter will feel his or her authority is being publicly undermined. Inevitably, the manager will resort to obstructing the mentoring relationship in order to protect his or her own position.

An experienced mentoring scheme administrator, quoted in a US newsletter, points out that it is only natural for the mentee's boss, who after all has a department to run, to be jealous of the mentor's influence - especially if the mentor has a powerful position in the organisation. ‘Remember that the boss is the boss, ' he advises would-be mentors. ‘And don't let your own experiences blind you to the realities. The last thing a mentee needs is advice from the mentor that leads to conflict with the supervisor. ' Had the line manager been involved in the programme from the beginning, he might have been more co-operative.

It is important that the mentor and line manager should not be seen to collude together, or even to discuss the mentee (this would make it difficult for the mentee to give full trust to the mentor). One company asks line managers to take prospective mentees to the mentor's office for the first meeting. In another, line managers and mentors are briefed together.

In companies where there are a large number of middle manager positions and few senior positions, mentors again need to conduct their mentoring relationships carefully. A manager who is unlikely to be promoted further may resent the fact that the mentee beneath him or her is being groomed for advancement. The manager will realise that he or she has been passed over by the company and could possibly attempt to hinder the mentee's prospects by writing unfavourable reports. In this situation the mentor and the mentee need to try to make the relationship between them as invisible as possible.

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Some salutary examples

Company A launched its mentoring scheme with a memo to its chief executives across Europe, instructing them to ensure that the top 100 women employees in the region were given mentors. The first the mentors and mentees knew about it was when they also received a memo telling them that they were participants in the programme and who they had been paired up with. Mentors and mentees met up for lunch, in most cases with very little idea of what was expected of them and what outcomes should come from the mentoring process. Six months later, only three pairs were still meeting regularly. Lack of clarity of purpose, lack of skills in the role and a feeling of being press-ganged not only prevented most people establishing a positive learning relationship but ensured that their cynicism spread to participants in other planned programmes.

Company B decided it would ‘help' mentors and mentees have meaningful discussions by insisting they meet every two weeks and giving them a detailed sheet of topics to consider. It also demanded a written record of what had been discussed, in broad terms. Mentors and mentees felt they were not trusted and struggled to establish and maintain rapport. Most relationships drowned in the bureaucracy. Those that survived subverted or ignored the rules and simply concentrated on issues of concern to the mentee at the time.

Company C went for the ‘sheep-dip' approach, assuming that only mentors needed training. Because the mentors were very senior, training was limited to just two hours and was mainly about explaining the role. When the relationships failed to gel, one-to-one interviews with the senior managers revealed what they would not admit in public or to their peer group that they felt inadequate for the role because they lacked a wide enough portfolio of skills and techniques.

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Everyone Needs a Mentor(c) Fostering Talent in Your Organisation
Everyone Needs a Mentor
ISBN: 1843980541
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 124

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