In-House Or External Mentor?

The cost of professional external mentors is enough to make most companies think twice about large-scale provision. In general, an external mentor is most appropriate when:

• the executive would find it difficult to be sufficiently open to an insider

• he or she is looking to tap into specific expertise or experience not available within the company.

Internal mentors are most appropriate when:

• there is a strong culture of peer dialogue and open learning

• the top team contains good role models for mentoring behaviours

• a knowledge of the internal politics and the organisation is important to the relationship.

In general, it pays to take the view that a good case needs to be made for external provision, and to make it clear that having an external mentor is not a status symbol, or a reward for good service, but a response to a specifically defined need. It is also important to be sure that a mentor is what is needed, rather than an executive coach or specialist counselling.

An external coach is most appropriate if:

• the need is remedial or to do with a specific skill set (eg delegation rather than leadership in general)

• the relationship is intended to be a short-term intervention (ie six months or less)

• achieving the developmental objective is likely to require direct observation and feedback by the external resource.

(There is considerable debate at the moment about how different the roles of coach and mentor are in the context of professional external provision. Although it is true that many of the same skill sets are required and there are well-trained practitioners who can bridge the two roles, the mentee or coachee must be quite clear as to the nature and scope of the relationship. )

Counselling is normally an option when the executive's performance issues are related to deeper psychological issues, rather than to technique. Again, there is considerable debate about the need for competence in behavioural psychology on the part of the coach or mentor. Stephen Berglas, in a controversial article in Harvard Business Review (June 2002), maintains that all coaches (he does not refer to mentors) should be psychologists, on the grounds that failure to spot psychoses leads to inappropriate guidance and sometimes to harm for the client. Other sources counter with the argument that few psychologists have the business or commercial understanding to be able to empathise with and contextualise the majority of problems that executives face. The answer seems to lie somewhere in between - to be effective in the role, professional executive coaches and mentors need a grounding in both psychology and management at a senior level.

Selecting the external mentor

Companies we are working with are increasingly setting up panels of approved coaches and mentors with sufficient breadth in composition to meet a variety of needs by their executives. This allows them, for example, to link an executive who is leading his first merger with an ‘elder statesman' who has been through the same mill numerous times, and to provide the potential director who needs to acquire learning on a number of fronts with a much more broadly skilled mentor who has a stronger background in behavioural psychology.

Each of these companies has established an interview template, which it uses to assess potential external mentors and coaches. It also makes sense to bring together the active mentors/coaches at least twice a year to discuss, within the bounds of client confidentiality, their observations about the organisation. Their perceptions can be invaluable in identifying cultural and broad developmental issues that the organisation needs to address. The panel members also gain peer learning, an important part of their continuous professional development (CPD). Some companies have decided that mentors and coaches who do not participate in these sessions should be dropped from the panel - not least because involvement in CPD is a key competence for the role.

Case Study
Discovery - an executive mentoring programme in Norway

Jennybeth Ekeland

A society which does not educate and train its women is like a person who just trains the right arm.

(Plato, BC 427-347)

Discovery is a mentoring programme aimed at increasing the number of women in high-level executive positions in Norway. The NHO (Norwegian Federation for Business and Industry) started the programme in 1996; in 1999 AFF (the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration) took over the programme. Since then 760 people - 380 mentees and the same number of mentors - have participated in the programme.

The mentees come from large Norwegian organisations, mostly from finance, media, IT and manufacturing. The age of the mentees ranges from 28 to 57. They all have experience as managers, some at a very high executive level. In recent years, the programme has been open to men as well, but few have taken the opportunity.

The mentors are top-level senior executives. Most of them are men, but the proportion of women is increasing. At first each company selected both mentors and mentees for the programme. Because the quality of the mentoring relationship greatly depends on the capability of the mentor, AFF changed this procedure. Today all the mentors are hand-picked to meet the developing needs of the mentees.

AFF finds the mentors from its network of senior executives who have attended lead- ership programmes over the years since 1952. These people see the role as continuing their own leadership development as mentors. The mentors are not paid for the work - this is a Norwegian mentoring tradition!

About the programme

When the companies have selected mentees, the project co-ordinators conduct comprehensive interviews in order to match mentor and mentees.

Discovery is a one-year programme. During this year there are four kinds of formal meeting or seminar:

• One half-day seminar to begin with, at which all the mentors and mentees meet together. The purpose is to establish a good working environment for the mentoring process. We focus on what mentoring is and the role of the mentor and mentee. There is also some training in mentoring skills.

• Meetings for the mentees. One month after the start, the mentees meet for networking and to clarify their roles.

• At four months and eight months there is a one-day meeting of both mentors and mentees for networking and sharing experience. Some additional training in mentoring skills is also included.

• At the end of the year everybody meets for a half-day seminar that includes dinner, to summarise the learning and to celebrate what they have received!

During the year every mentor and mentee has a minimum of ten to twelve meetings, each of 1 1⁄2 to 2 hours. Both mentee and mentor must be committed to the programme and its goals, and make active participation a priority.

The mentors and mentees are also included in AFF's networking arrangements. They are invited to five half-day management seminars within the year, and receive AFF's newsletter which contains updated articles about leadership and organisational development.

In recent years the programme co-ordinator has co-operated with Clutterbuck Associates in developing the programme and in using the the Mentoring Dynamics Survey (an instrument diagnostic of relationship quality, which also acts as a stimulus for reflection on the progress of the relationship).

Evaluation

Each segment of the programme is evaluated to assess both processes and outcomes. During the evaluation, assessment data is monitored to check:

• that both mentors and mentees are learning(!)

• that both report

• increased self-insight

• increased self-confidence

• better understanding and consciousness of the leadership role

• greater awareness of values and attitudes

• increased work satisfaction.

One of the aims of the programme is to help develop stronger networks - and this is the one disappointing area in our evaluations, for relatively few participants make significant use of this opportunity. Participants seem to put all their efforts into the mentor-mentee relationship itself. We suspect this is in part an issue of the Norwegian culture - other research undertaken by AFF shows that Norwegians often under- estimate the importance of networking.

A Discovery programme for the regional districts of Norway

Inspired by Discovery, SND (the Norwegian Industrial and Regional Development Foundation) initiated a mentoring programme in 2000 for the regional districts of Norway. It was given the name LeaderMentor because the programme contains more leadership development elements than Discovery does. The participants hail from anywhere between the furthest south and the furthest north of Norway. A majority of the mentees come from very small enterprises, and the SND lends some economic support to their participation. It is an extra-difficult challenge for the AFF then to try to match mentors with mentees who enjoy some degree of geographical proximity.

The steering committee

AFF, NHO and SND have together set up a steering committee to look after the development of these two programmes. The committee has six members who not only are very experienced and prominent in the mentoring field but are also top-level senior executives - and all have been mentors or mentees. The steering committee plays an important and powerful role in the development of the mentoring programmes of the AFF.