Chapter 16: E-mentoring | Everyone Needs a Mentor

Overview

e-mentoring: mentoring relationships conducted primarily or entirely via e-mail

I am, I have to admit, a converted sceptic about mentoring at a distance. Having invested so much time and research into the virtues of face-to-face developmental dialogue, I could not see how the mentoring relationship could possibly be as meaningful when the primary form of communication was e-mail. Experience as an e-mentor and interviews with participants in successful e-mentoring relationships have convinced me that e-mentoring is not an inferior substitute for ‘real'mentoring. Rather, it is simply a different approach to mentoring and can be as effective - and in some cases, potentially more effective - than traditional approaches.

The arguments against e-mentoring can be summarised as follows:

Even with teleconferencing, it is much more difficult to recognise the undertones in what someone is saying. With e-mail, you miss hesitations, prevarications and revealing facial expressions.
Face-to-face dialogue has an immediacy that allows the two people to bounce ideas off each other creatively - it is easier to get into ‘flow'when interaction is supported by non-verbal communication.
Close visual contact allows mentors to use techniques of mirroring to build rapport.
Words on paper can often be misleading - face-to-face, it is easier to explore what each party understands by a word or phrase.
Distant communication often leads to a heavy focus on transactional exchanges rather than on relationship-building. This tends to make the relationship shallower. (We have no objective evidence one way or another on this, and not a great deal of anecdotal evidence either, but it is a view strongly held in some quarters. )
It is more difficult to use techniques such as transactional analysis or NLP, which rely on a range of visual and auditory clues, to help the mentee explore his or her drives, motivations and fears.

However, the contra-arguments are equally convincing:

Given an issue in writing, mentors are able to spend more time thinking about the advice they give and the questions they will ask. The quality of BDQs(‘bloody difficult questions') often improves with e-mentoring. In effect, mentors ask fewer but more succinct and more insight-provoking questions than in the heat of a face-to-face dialogue.
Equally, mentees have more time to consider their responses. Strong reflectors (in learning styles jargon) particularly appreciate this space. For strong activists it provides a useful discipline to stop and think an issue through.
Nuances that may be missed in the heat of face-to-face dialogue often become more obvious in text.
Textual dialogue is easier to review - it is like having a transcript - and mentors report that they often spot patterns or repetitions that they would not otherwise have noticed.
E-mentoring often allows for much more rapid responses by the mentor to the mentee's urgent enquiries. While it may take several weeks to fix up a suitable time to meet face-to-face, an e-mail exchange can take place the same day or at worst within a few days.
Whereas a face-to-face mentoring session may take a focused period of a couple of hours, e-mentoring dialogue can be broken down into shorter, progressive exchanges, spread over several days or more.

Like most other approaches within mentoring, e-mentoring clearly has more useful application in some circumstances than in others. Where mentor and mentee are geographically separated, especially if they are in different countries or even different time zones, it provides a practical way of ensuring frequency of interaction between mentor and mentee.

Relatively little e-mentoring is carried out in real time, involving mentor and mentee both seated at the computer at the same time. Most people find that it is more practical, in such circumstances, to use the telephone or video-conferencing.

In practice, most use of e-mentoring is hybrid. Mentoring pairs may meet perhaps once a quarter face-to-face and several times in between by e-mail. Distant pairs may communicate some of the time by e-mail, but at other times by telephone or video-conferencing, to maintain the emotional rapport.

In order to make the best of e-mentoring, it makes sense to consider what the co-ordinator and the participants should do at each stage of the relationship. At the rapport-building stage the difficulty is to create a relationship in the first place. Says Kevin Hunt, who organised a large-scale e-mentoring project for small businesses (see case study below):

Within the context of mentoring, the relationship is normally one that forms naturally. However, within e-mentoring, creating the relationship early on is absolutely critical. So for large-scalee-mentoring projects the ability to match individuals electronically, when they have never met, and to ensure that they establish a positive relationship, is by far the biggest challenge.

Whether the relationship is face-to-face or e-mentoring, it is normally enhanced if both parties have a measure of the other in terms of:

general world view (ie what they feel is important in their lives)
sense of humour (eg whether/when it is acceptable to be flippant at times)
how strictly they will adhere to the rules on confidentiality
what they want from the relationship
what each can additionally offer the other
how empathetic they will be
what they have generally in common.

All of this can be established using distance media such as telephone and e-mail. However, the quality of such exchanges is subtly different from that in face-to-face meetings. (Experience from some e-learning research in the United States found that several learning pairs got along fine - until they eventually met in person. Then the relationship collapsed!) A broad ground rule for scheme co-ordinators is that they should ensure that participants who do not meet in person have a much deeper exchange of information about each other. In addition to the factual data of CVs and learning needs, it is important to tap into the emotional personality. I find the following questions to be particularly useful:

What do you care passionately about?
What are you most proud about in your career?
What is your biggest fear in managing a relationship like this?
What do enjoy most about your work?
How would other people describe you?
What do you enjoy most about being a mentor?
What is your biggest ambition at work? Outside of work?
Who do you admire, and why?

Barraging someone with such questions is not necessarily a good idea, but selecting appropriately begins the process of establishing an understanding of and respect for the other person - and this in turn reinforces rapport.

Because rapport must be maintained throughout the relationship, it is helpful for the distant mentor and mentee to get into the habit - as would be the case in a traditional face-to-face-meeting - of exchanging social information about families, children, holidays, and so on, before getting down to the nitty-gritty of the focused mentoring dialogue. Some mentoring pairs prefer to separate out these two aspects of the relationship, but most prefer to mix them.

The value of an initial face-to-face meeting before the e-mentoring relationship gets under way is illustrated by a mentoring pair of which the mentee was in Italy and the mentor in Finland. Several months after the relationship was supposed to have started, nothing had happened, other than the exchange of a few e-mails that dealt with nothing substantive. Part of the problem lay in the fact that the mentor had just been promoted to an intensive new job in the United States and had many problems of his own to deal with. In the end, he flew to Italy, with the prime objective of meeting up with his mentee. From this initial meeting emerged very clear objectives and routines about how they were going to work together. This relationship, which was henceforth conducted mainly through e-mails and telephone, proved to be one of the strongest and most beneficial in the programme.

In many cases (perhaps most), however, there will be no opportunity to meet beforehand. This puts a great deal of initial pressure on the programme co-ordinator to make a success of the matching and to follow up each relationship closely for at least the first few weeks, to ensure that it is functioning effectively. Specific questions to both mentee and mentor about the potential, quality and tone of the relationship are important, and about the relevance of the mentor's knowledge, experience and approach. The co-ordinator may well need to intervene to ensure that one or both parties has appropriate expectations of the relationship.

In the direction-setting phase, clear goals for the relationship are at least as important as in a face-to-face relationship. In practice, many people find that clarity is aided by having the goals - for both parties - written down. It sometimes becomes possible to analyse what each aspect or word of a goal means in a much more systematic way than in a normal face-to-face discussion.

During the progress-making stage, mentors and mentees have found that it helps to establish a routine of, say, monthly semi-formal exchanges in which the mentee describes his or her progress, outlines current and/or ongoing issues, and is as specific as possible about the kind of help he or she would like. The mentor agrees to respond within a set time-frame, and both make sure they exchange dates of holidays or business trips of more than a few days so that the expectation of contact is not broken. Attention to netiquette (considerate conventions for e-communication) is an important element of training for both parties. Some companies have produced guidelines on netiquette as a checklist for participants.

Other issues to consider in managing this phase of the e-mentoring relationship include:

An agreeable style of communication must be established - both mentors and mentees may need to learn how to ‘muse'in text without rambling.
As in a face-to-face meeting, it helps to establish at each interaction what the issues for discussion are, what outcomes are looked for and what kind of response the mentee is looking to the mentor to make.
Mentees have to develop the skills of explaining issues very clearly in writing - sometimes it can be difficult to balance giving enough information for the mentor to ask appropriate questions and give relevant advice, without drowning them in detail.
The mentor should ask the mentee to summarise (just as in face-to-face mentoring) from time to time, to ensure that they are both on the same wavelength - this is often forgotten, when communicating in text.
Mentors sometimes find that the natural instinct to give advice, rather than help the mentee come to his or her own conclusions, is stronger when they see an issue in text. Fortunately, the extra thinking-time allowed by the medium provides space to overcome this instinct.

When it comes to winding up, in particular, the importance of an open review of what has been learned and achieved by both mentor and mentee, and what they have appreciated about each other's contribution to the relationship, is important in sustaining the sense of positive value and mutual respect.

At all stages in the relationship, experience by companies such as British Telecom (see case study below) suggests that using a wide range of media can enrich the relationship considerably. In addition to e-mail and telephone, there is considerable potential for fax and document exchange, for example. It can be very satisfying for a mentor to receive a text message on his or her mobile phone, ‘Thanks for your help. I tried the solution we discussed, and it worked!'

Case Study
E-mentoring at British Telecom

Zulfiqar Hussain

In 2001 Zulfi Hussain designed, developed and launched an e-mentoring programme under the auspices of BT's Ethnic Minority Network (EMN). The e-mentoring programme is designed to enhance the capabilities of a conventional mentoring programme, which has now been in existence for over seven years and is recognised as the largest of its kind in Europe.

BT EMN e-mentoring began as a pilot in June 2001, with four matched pairs of mentors and mentees - Belfast/Leicester, Leeds/Cardiff, Leeds/Glasgow, and Luton/Bristol - to enable good coverage of the UK.

The e-mentoring scheme was formally launched at the BT EMN annual conference of October 2001. Since then the programme has grown steadily and is currently seen as one of the most pioneering programmes of its kind, which makes full use of all the different types of technologies available such as e-mail, audio and video conferences, net meeting and even text messaging.

The aims of both the conventional and the e-mentoring programmes, explains Zulfi Hussain, is to

develop individuals and help them discover their capabilities, understand the culture of the organisation, remove barriers, break the glass ceiling, enhance their careers and achieve their full potential. However, the e-mentoring programme provides ‘global reach with a local touch'by overcoming time and distance barriers, and adding a truly cross-cultural dimension.

Programme management

A small team of volunteers manages the e-mentoring programme. Each owns and manages one of the key activities, such as managing the database of participants, promoting the programme, the recruitment of mentors and mentees, and the all- important matching process.

Because the team members are spread across the UK, their meetings are generally held by regular audio conferences, but they do meet occasionally face-to-face, if and when required - for example, to resolve any issues and make improvements to the programmes.

The recruitment of mentors and mentees is done in various ways, including face-to- face discussions, adverts in internal publications, via BT's intranet and through campaigns organised by EMN and the various BT business units.

Mentors and mentees who wish to join the programme are asked to complete an online application form on the EMN website. They are asked to provide their contact details, business unit, grade, training and qualifications, achievements in the last two years, hobbies and interests, and the characteristics of the mentor/mentee with whom they wish to be matched.

Matching and support

Mentors and mentees are matched on a regular basis to achieve best results, taking into account grade, location (where appropriate), shared interests, career aspirations and development needs.

Zulfi stresses that

matches are never made merely to get people off the waiting list. The policy is to wait until a good match can be found to avoid premature failure of the mentoring relationship and any disappointment.

A letter of introduction is sent by e-mail to the mentor and mentee, asking them to make contact with each other. They are also encouraged to prepare for the first meeting to establish the ground rules of the relationship, and to agree joint aims and objectives.

The programme management team provides ongoing support for mentors and mentees via the telephone, e-mail and, if required, face-to-face meetings. Formal training workshops are also run on a regular basis.

Conventional v e-mentoring

The fundamental strategy and procedures for conventional and e-mentoring are pretty much the same, according to Zulfi, but the BT experience has shown that e-mentoring offers opportunities for mentors and mentees that would not otherwise be possible. These include:

a global reach, which provides a greater range of cross-cultural and multinational exchange, enriching the experience of mentors, mentees and BT
flexibility and no restrictions on time and location as a limiting factor in the matching process
the participation of a much wider talent pool from around the world.

Monitoring and lessons learned

The e-mentoring programme is monitored using anecdotal feedback, verbal and written reports. Lessons learned to date include:
The expectations of both the mentor and mentee must be managed carefully, to avoid disappointment.
The roles and responsibilities of the people managing the programme must be clearly defined.
All procedures must be robust and slot in end-to-end, and the matching process must be as efficient and as swift as possible.
The continual ‘cleansing'of the database is an absolute must.
The programme must be promoted at every opportunity, particularly to recruit new participants.
Ongoing monitoring and regular review is essential to evaluate the effectiveness of the programme, make improvements, and measure the benefits.

Benefits

The programme has provided considerable benefits for the mentees, mentors and BT:
The benefits to the mentees have included improved self-confidence, learning to cope with the formal and informal structure of the company, the receipt of career advice, extensive networking opportunities, and of course managerial tutelage.
The mentors have also gained from the mentoring relationship. Benefits have included improved job satisfaction, a greater insight into their own level of knowledge, and a new perspective on BT and on the business case for diversity (as provided by the mentee).
There is no doubt that BT has gained by having a workforce with improved motivation, improved communications and a leadership development programme that not only develops participants but also ensures that key cultural values are passed on.

Case Study
E-mentoring for small businesses

The Small Business Service (SBS) and the South-East England Development Agency (SEEDA) provided funding for Business Link Surrey to pilot an e-mentoring scheme for small businesses in 2002-2003. Designed and developed by Kevin Hunt, the South-East Regional Director for SBS, following research and evidence from the small business community, the project was evaluated by the Mentoring and Coaching Research Group at Sheffield Hallam University.

The aim of this project was to equip small business owners with a short-term (three months) burst of mentoring support on which they could subsequently build should they so wish. The mentors were experienced businesspeople drawn from the business community and the Business Volunteers Mentors Association. The programme offered mentors and mentees training in the form of a CD-ROM that introduced them to the aims of the scheme, the roles and responsibilities, and how to get the best from the relationship. More than 40 pairs took part in the pilot, and more than half of all participants responded to the evaluation survey.

Among the key results of the survey were that:

96 per cent of mentees and 80 per cent of mentors described the experience as positive.
91 per cent of mentees and 84 per cent of mentors said they would like to participate in a future programme.
60 per cent of mentees and 70 per cent of mentors cited convenience, flexibility and ease as the major benefits of e-mail mentoring.
30 per cent said they felt there was an element of impersonality about this type of mentoring.
50 per cent were considering continuing the relationship after the pilot period.

Quotes from participants included:

What the mentoring programme has done is ‘enforced'delivery of a business plan, enabled prioritisation of different business opportunities, given me a clearer focus on what resources I need, and given me more confidence in my own business abilities.

I had been sceptical about whether I would be comfortable discussing business issues/concerns with a ‘stranger' by e-mail - thinking it would be too impersonal - but I was surprised by how quickly it was possible to build a relationship of trust in this way. I believe, however, that some form of meeting would have instantly strengthened the relationship.

Among key lessons from the pilot programme was the importance of:
appropriate matching
goal clarity on the part of the mentee
training for both mentors and mentees
setting a communication plan from the beginning
supplementing e-mail with other forms of communication
encouragement from the mentor, to sustain the mentee's motivation.