Management Tips:

Mentoring for excellence

Dr. K. Kuhathasan, CEO, CENLEAD

Young employees generally develop a relationship of trust and confidence with their seniors who provide support and guidance to them. They are people whom the younger employees idolise, admire and follow.

An excellent relationship emerges between these senior and experienced people (mentors) and young people (protege) which is informal and is called as mentoring.

Mentoring is different from training. Unlike a line management arrangement where seniority and rank are the main considerations, a mentor's role is to listen, put questions, probe for facts and career choices and act as a source of strength and encouragement to the protege.

Successful mentoring programme:

1. Have top management support.

2. Are part of a larger human resources/career development effort.

3. Consist only of volunteer participants.

4. Tend to be made up of relatively short phases.

5. Select mentors and proteges carefully.

6. Have 'Structured flexibility'

7. Make everyone aware of the problems that may arise

8. Have an effective monitoring system.

9. Start small and grow.

10. Orient both mentors and proteges before the relationship begins.

Objectives of mentoring

1. To maximise human potential and establish a relationship of trust.

2. A cost-effective way for providing personality development.

3. Modelling behavioural norms for the young member.

4. Better staff retention levels and recruitment prospects.

5. To help transfer of managerial skills from senior to junior level.

6. It leads to more action, innovation, learning and swifter adjustment to changing business needs.

7. To reduce managerial and professional turnover, it lessens the threat of other companies luring away young employees.

8. It helps employees to adopt the organisational culture.

9. To help protege to search alternative solution for a problem.

10. To give employees a sense of satisfaction, a sense of value and status, an opportunity to develop their qualities and skills.

11. Career development of employees.

12. To provide a source of help and support in the development of new skills and guidance.

13. To provide to the new employee access to someone with an understanding of the organisation's culture and ways of working.

Peer group mentoring

There are a variety of approaches to peer group mentoring. The methods vary according to their target population. Most common is newly recruited staff.

In the case of new recruits, the mentoring system attempts to provide them with a responsible and well-informed friend and to introduce management skills to the young people

Self-development mentoring

This approach is used to demonstrate to young people the responsibility they have for making use of the development opportunities the employer provides.

The aim is to ensure that people recruited are proactive, self-confident, action oriented employees, who will, in time, become competent managers, organisations attempting major restructuring or change are increasingly supplementary their efforts in this way.

How mentoring benefits the individual

Every company needs some form of career development programme to have a succession of motivated, upward moving employees.

Even employees who are destined to remain at the same level may need career development, as all jobs are undergoing change as a result of new technology.

Youngsters with high potential will be able to identify and improve their skills, set career goals and know how to achieve those goals in the most practical and efficient way.

How mentoring benefits the company

Mentoring can work in most organisations, regardless of size, culture, or market sector. It can communicate to employees far more fully the complexity of procedures and the unique nature of the company than any formal training course, induction booklets or company manual.

Mentoring enhances the abilities of both the mentor and protege, so the organisation gains through increased efficiency. Companies with formal, longstanding mentoring programmes claim tangible results in productivity and efficiency. Intangible benefits include improved staff morale, greater career satisfaction.

Benefits of a mentoring programme

1. Well established recruitment and induction programme.

2. Improved motivation

3. A stable corporate culture

4. Leadership development

5. Improved Interpersonal relations.

Mentoring fundam entals

No matter what mentoring approaches you may adopt, you may have to apply the following fundamentals.

Facilitate thinking instead of giving the answer

Good mentors make people to think, encourage them to form their own opinion. They see themselves as facilitators and drivers.

Encourage teams to take risks

Mentors push teams to experiment with new approaches and to rely their instincts and experience to move in new directions - as opposed to always doing things the same way, or relying too heavily on numbers to drive a decision.

The objective of any mentoring programme should be to make many people and not just the manager, to achieve maximum results. Overall success of the team depends largely on good mentoring.

Good Mentors are:

1. Good motivators. They will be able to support the objectives of the programme and fulfil their responsibilities to the candidate.

2. Able to show, that a responsibility for mentoring is part of their own job description.

3. Able to establish, a good professional relationship, be sympathetic, accessible and knowledgeable about the candidate's area of interest.

4. Sufficiently senior, to be in touch with the corporate structure, allowing candidates to explore and pursue ideas.