Chapter 13: Graduate Mentoring

Ten Keys For The Successful Graduate Mentoring Scheme

The transition from education to the world of work can come as a bit of a shock. The nature of learning - and the speed with which it has to take place - is considerably different. Instead of pursuing a self-focused goal (getting a degree), the graduate is expected to share team learning and team goals. Different behaviours, different thinking patterns, the need to develop some clarity of personal purpose and direction, the need to build effective networks of influence and information - these are all classic situations addressed by mentoring.

It is no coincidence, then, that formal mentoring schemes in the UK and Europe were almost all aimed at graduates until the mid-1990s. Companies could see immediate advantages in attracting and keeping this valuable asset. Pilkington, among others, calculated the cost savings to the company of having graduates stay longer and contribute sooner. One large packaging company found that its graduates, teamed with mentors to address long-standing but low-priority technical problems in production, saved more through quality improvements than the entire training and recruitment budget for all staff on site!

It did not always work out so well, however. Many schemes either collapsed as pressures of change made it more difficult for mentors to provide quality time, or simply faded away because there was no real ownership. A new phase of graduate mentoring can now be discerned in many organisations - one that is characterised by greater realism and a stronger determination to make graduate mentoring part of the organisational infrastructure.

A lot of lessons have been learned. The following represent a mixture of the most common and the most important.

1 Managing the power distance

Early graduate mentoring schemes adopted an American model and matched young people with very senior people - often at or just below the board. They were almost universally wasted. The executives could not empathise with the situation of someone just starting out on their career. They either preached at the graduates or tried to relive their own careers through them. They had neither the time nor the inclination to act as anything but sponsors (a small part of the potential role and now generally discouraged in European mentoring schemes), and they learned little in return.

Good practice now is to limit the size of the hierarchy and experience gaps, to promote empathy and mutual learning. The trick is to have enough scope for the graduate to respect and value the mentor's experience, but to be close enough to develop a genuine rapport.

2 Timing the start of the relationship

Most schemes even now assume that the mentoring relationship should begin as soon as the graduate arrives. Practical experience increasingly brings that assumption into question. It seems that a significant minority of relationships fail to gel because the graduate simply does not know enough about the organisation, nor about his or her needs, to bring real issues to the table. Both mentor and mentee rapidly become bored, and the developmental opportunity is lost.

Some schemes now deliberately defer the appointment of a mentor for the first few months, preferring to give the graduate a ‘buddy' from a previous intake, who can answer most of the questions about where to find things and how to behave. Mentoring relationships established after this tend to have an immediately higher sense of purpose and quality of dialogue.

3 Linking to competencies

Early thinking on graduate mentoring was that the mentor should avoid discussion on specific competencies because it might undermine the authority of the graduate's line manager. There is, of course, still some truth in that, but the recognition is increasingly that clarity of role between line manager (as coach), mentor and human resources in developing the graduate is essential. The mentor can help the graduate examine specific competency needs beyond the confines of current tasks and in the perspective of his or her career as a whole.

4 Who gets trained?

Early mentoring schemes focused training on the mentors. Most new schemes emphasise the need for the mentee to play a much greater role in managing the relationship. The evidence suggests that the benefits flowing from mentoring increase significantly when both parties fully understand what is expected of them and how they can get the best out of it. Mentee training can be shorter than mentor training, but there are practical skills - such as how to structure requests for help - that can be of particular value to the mentee.

One of the particular benefits reported by mentors from mentee training is that the graduates start the relationship with clearer, more realistic expectations about what the mentor can or should do for them, and about their own responsibilities in maintaining the relationship.

Some companies, such as BAT, also train line manager coaches in the basics of mentoring so that they will be supportive of the role and will be less likely to feel threatened by it.

5 Focus on the practical

A lot of graduate mentoring schemes have floundered because people did not know what to do. Even where they had had some form of training, they lacked the confidence to make the relationship work. Typically, either the mentor or the mentee talked for an hour or so, and both wondered why they were there. Some companies involve the line manager in the first meeting, helping to create some sense of purpose and direction. Others simply provide an opportunity to practise how to conduct the initial and subsequent meetings. Such practice sessions instil confidence and identify concerns that may hinder the successful relationship.

6 Focus on opportunities, not problems

Some mentoring schemes in which Ihave participated have struggled because the mentor has been presented as ‘someone who can help you with your problems'. If the environment is such that it discourages people from discussing their problems with someone more senior (or even admitting they have problems), the pair soon run out of things to talk about. Part of the problem is that mentors often lack the career counselling skills to be of much use in helping the graduate define and seize opportunities. This argues for continued training of mentors as more all-round ‘developers of people', and for the involvement of the mentor group as a whole in succession planning and development planning.

7 Review relationships at least twice in the first year

Early schemes simply put people together and hoped for the best. There is now much greater use of matching processes, some utilising software to provide a measure towards an assessment of compatibility. Good practice schemes also allow either mentor or graduate to withdraw if the relationship does not work out, under a ‘no fault divorce clause'. Where this is done with a planned, constructive discussion between mentor and graduate, it typically results in a more appropriate second match.

It is also useful to gather feedback from both mentors and graduates at six months and 12 months on the performance of their relationships and the scheme as a whole. This allows the scheme co-ordinator to intervene as necessary, perhaps with specific further training.

8 Gain the commitment of top management

Mentoring has flourished in organisations with a generally poor development climate when it has received public and enthusiastic support from top management. In particular, if top management is prepared to both be mentors to middle managers and to talk about their own experiences as mentees, it provides an impetus to the whole programme.

9 Recognising and supporting the mentors

One of the most common concerns expressed by graduate mentors is that even having been trained, they are largely left to it. Sir John Harvey-Jones says that one of the few things he wished he had done differently at ICI was to make a bigger deal of the efforts of senior people as mentors. Some companies now reward mentors by making them members of ‘development clubs' which have greater than normal access to directors and their thinking - knowledge that is, of course, very useful in discussions with graduates about career direction.

10 The two-year cliff edge

Within the typical two-year duration of the graduate mentoring scheme, the relationship generally winds down. The graduate is settled into the organisation, has become part of a normal work team, and has a reasonable idea of where he or she is headed. He or she does not really need a mentor any more, and in that mentors are a scarce resource, the relationship is usually expected to come to an end.

What frequently happens after the two years, however, is that the graduate begins to acquire greater responsibilities which provide a whole new set of challenges, or gets bored because the challenges do not come fast enough. In either situation there is high potential for this valuable resource to be lured away.

Enter the secondary mentor, someone usually more senior than the first, whose role is to help the graduate - now an employee without a special label on his or her collar - to continue to develop a career within the organisation. This mentor is likely to be more challenging, better networked and sometimes more demanding than the first. This ‘layering' of levels of mentor is becoming an increasingly common characteristic of organisations which wish to maximise their use of a scarce developmental resource.