The Case To The Mentor

All the surveys and reviews I have conducted in recent years to evaluate the outcomes of mentoring programmes have indicated that the most frequent and most powerful benefits for mentors are:

• the learning they take from the experience, both in having to explain intuitive reasoning and in listening to a different perspective (ie the problems mentees have with their bosses often cause mentors to reflect on similar issues their direct reports may have with them!)

• the opportunity to make a reflective space in a hectic daily schedule

• the satisfaction of knowing that they have made a difference to someone else

• the intellectual challenge of working on issues for which they do not have to take personal responsibility and that may take them into unfamiliar territory

• increased skills base and reputation.

Mentors questioned in the Industrial Society survey (1995) list the main benefits as prompting reassessment of their own views and leadership style, awareness of the views of more junior staff, a broader perspective, and discovering talent. Other benefits recorded were ‘useful roles for plateaued managers' and that mentoring was good for their own career progression. Field experience suggests that when mentees are unaware of how much their mentors are getting out of the relationship, they are constrained in how much use they make of it.

Learning by the mentor

Mentors learn from mentees in a variety of ways.

Firstly, it often occurs that the problems the mentee describes with his or her own manager sound horribly like the mirror image of issues the mentor has with one of his or her direct reports, prompting the mentor to reflect on his or her own behaviour.

Secondly, explaining concepts to someone else is a good way to reinforce good practice in oneself. (Being seen as a role model also puts some pressure on the mentor to live up to his or her own values. )

Thirdly, the mentee is a superb resource of different experience, from which the mentor can extract learning. So much so that some companies now encourage mentoring pairs to be as different as they can tolerate. A good example is the following, recounted to me by the head of diversity in a public sector organisation:

We had a senior manager who simply wouldn't take the diversity message on board. He wasn't hostile, but he was dismissive - it simply wasn't enough of an issue to warrant his time or that of his direct reports. I took the gamble of asking him to become the mentor of a younger black man, who had potential to go far in the organisation. Shortly after that, he was promoted to become a regional manager. I met him on a train about six months into the mentoring relationship. He sat down beside me and said: ‘My region is a hotbed of racism. What can I do about it?'The transformation had been achieved through listening to his mentee and seeing the world for the first time through black eyes.

The process of climbing the corporate ladder often means missing out on new ideas, techniques and technologies. There never seems to be the time for catching up, and at a certain stage it becomes embarrassing to admit ignorance. Directing the learning experiences of the mentee gives the mentor the excuse he or she needs to devote the time to developing his or her own knowledge too. It is also often acknowledged that the best way to learn is to teach. Some companies see mentees as a source of practical help for the mentor, while Midland Bank (now HSBC) has found that

Mentors have identified a need to increase their own business awareness of Midland Group in order to be better placed to respond to mentees.

Opportunities to reflect

The more senior people become in an organisation, the less thinking time they seem to have. Many mentors regard their mentoring sessions as a welcome opportunity to adopt a change of pace. Some also report that the discipline of doing so helps them take reflective space to consider their own issues, too.

Intellectual challenge

The most successful mentoring relationships almost always involve a heightened level of mutual challenge, based upon the quality of trust and respect between the two partners. Says one mentor:

I wouldn't say I'm coasting in my job, but there's not a lot of intellectual stretch in it for me. But the problems my mentee brings me don't have straightforward answers. It's clear he relishes the discussions, and lately we've branched out into wider areas of company policy. As a result I've taken some ideas for change to my director, and there's a high chance my job will expand to take some of them forward.

Personal satisfaction

Helping a promising younger employee make progress can be a challenging and stimulating experience for a mentor, especially if his or her own career has reached a temporary or permanent plateau. Some managers whose careers have reached a real or perceived plateau find the challenge of mentoring both rewarding and stimulating and have been motivated to put new effort into their own career planning.

Mentors often find the mentoring relationship rewarding in many other ways - for example, in pride when the mentee achieves personal goals. Mentors also gain a sense of purpose in seeing the values and culture of an organisation handed to a new generation and in thinking more carefully about company policies. Says an industrial company with a long-running mentoring programme:

Mentoring has made us question traditional thinking and practices, firstly to clarify them in our own minds before explaining them to our mentees, but also in not just defending them when challenged through the innocent, unadulterated eyes of the newcomer who has not yet been influenced by our culture.

Increased skills base and reputation

A mentor who identifies promising employees acquires a reputation for having a keen insight into the needs of the company. This enhances his or her status with peers. The international accounting firm Merrill Lynch & Co. constructed a formal system of rewarding its mentors. Mentors' names are included in regularly circulated reports about mentees' accomplishments. Mentors are personally thanked by top management and are invited to be presenters at mentor briefing sessions which are run for new participants. A spokesman for the firm explains:

We feel we need to reward our mentors visibly and link their success publicly to the success of the mentoring programme.

One thing the mentor does not receive, and should not be led to expect from the scheme, is a direct payment or bonus to compensate him or her for the time and effort spent. An argument against such payments is that developing others is an integral part of every manager's job. A more powerful argument is that mentorship has to be built on friendship and is a close and personal relationship. So turning it into a paid service is likely to hinder the relaxed and informal atmosphere necessary between mentor and mentee. In theory, this can become a problem if the company links human development objectives to a bonus scheme as part of the annual performance appraisal. In practice, the trick is to ensure that the mentor is neither especially rewarded nor penalised for this part of his or her job.

A few companies reward their mentors with status, inviting them to attend annual or biannual lunches or dinners with top management, where people strategies are discussed in open forum. Access to top management thinking - the inside track - is a prized commodity in most organisations.

Mentors at Pilkington Glass, proponents of one of the earliest graduate mentoring schemes in Europe, perceived the following benefits:

• We clarify and question our perception of the company.

• We see the company through fresh eyes.

• We improve our abilities so we have more to offer the mentee.

• We see people work in different ways depending on whether they are theorists, activists, etc.

• It offers a new challenge.

• It offers a new learning experience.

• We understand the trauma new recruits experience and can be more sympathetic to others undergoing change.