The Business Case In Brief

We explore the benefits to employers, mentees, mentors and third parties more fully in Chapter 4 and in Appendix 1, so this is simply a brief summary. Employer organisations have found that having a well-run mentoring scheme has a significant, positive impact upon both recruitment and retention. In some cases, the loss of young graduates in their first year has been cut by two-thirds, simply because there is someone outside the authority structure who has the interest to listen and the breadth of perspective to help the mentee make wise and confident choices.

Other employer benefits relate to having more effective succession planning, helping employees cope with the stresses of major change, and increasing productivity.

Mentees report a wide range of benefits, ranging from speed of settling in to a new role to deeper understanding of their own motivations. Recent research has led us to categorise the benefits to mentees in four ways:

• development outcomes, which may include knowledge, technical competence and behavioural competence

• career outcomes, which may include the achievement (in part or whole) of career goals

• enabling outcomes, such as having a career plan, a (self)-development plan, a wider network of influencers or learning resources

• emotional outcomes - less tangible, but often powerful changes in emotional state, including increased confidence, altruistic satisfaction, reflective space, status and the pleasure of a different kind of intellectual challenge.

These same benefits seem to apply broadly to mentors as well. The principal benefit described by mentors in successful developmental mentoring relationships is the learning they acquire from the experience. (This is not the case in sponsorship mentoring (see Chapter 2). A recent survey by Sandia Laboratories in the United States did not list ‘own learning'as a benefit at all. This is not unexpected in a style of mentoring where the authority and power of the mentor are seen as important elements in the emotional contract. ) Second comes the satisfaction from helping someone else - the vicarious pleasure of seeing someone else succeed.

Third parties, such as line managers and work colleagues, benefit because the mentee has someone with whom to discuss how he or she builds and maintains better working relationships. One recent case reported to me by a colleague concerns a man who explained that his reason for seeking a mentor was to help him get out from under his boss, for whom he had very little respect. After six months, the mentoring pair agreed to change the objective. By reflecting on the relationship with his boss and working to improve it, he had eventually realised that this person had much to teach him and that they could get along together pretty well.

Outside the work environment, mentoring has had a remarkable influence on the lives of a wide spectrum of disadvantaged or dispossessed people.

When I originally wrote this book, I debated whether Everyone Needs a Mentor was truly accurate as a title. After all, perhaps there were people who could live their lives without any recourse to such external help. I have yet to find anyone who is self-sufficient enough not to benefit from having a mentor at some point in his or her life. What I have found is many thousands of people who wish they could have had a mentor at formative periods or times of critical personal transition. It is gratifying that most of these people are willing to give others what they did not have. Perhaps another definition of mentoring might be ‘Man's humanity to Man'(in the generic sense of ‘Man', of course!).