A COMPARISION OF
"MENTOR" VERSUS "GUIDE" ROLES:
Providing Peer Assistance
Structures That Are Matched to the Protege's Experience
By Barry Sweeny, © 2008
INDEX:
Does "One Size
Fit All"?
Thousands of new or other high potential employees are assigned
to and work with mentors in every type of organization every year.
Across all of these proteges there is a large range in their life
and work experiences, needs, and in their goals for their involvement
in mentoring. In all of these cases, the mentors which are assigned
to support these proteges will have to adjust the intensity, frequency,
kind, and focus of their mentoring assistance to fit the needs
and prior experience of these proteges. Yet we almost always call
all of this vast variety of help "mentoring".
We need TWO "Sizes"
of Mentoring
One result of calling all of these forms of assistance "mentoring"
is that the meaning of mentoring has been expanded to include
almost everything, and so means almost nothing specifically. The
net impact of this is that mentoring remains somewhat less than
the special relationship it should be.
This author suggests that we create two levels of "mentoring"
each with a different name, and level of status. Further, he offers
that there are a number of significant benefits of doing this,
which many organizations should try to capture for their program
participants and organizations.
Comparing Mentoring
and Guide Roles
Here is how typical Guide or "buddy" roles and mentoring
roles are structured to work.
A GUIDE is assigned to any protege who has more than one
year of recent, prior professional experience in their new assignment,
and who is either:
A. New to the organization, or
B. Transferred within the organization to a
new assignment, level, or site.
A MENTOR is to be assigned to any employee
who is:
A. A novice or beginner with no prior experience
in the profession
B. A new employee to the organization who has
two years or less of recent, prior professional experience in
another similar field or organizational setting.
C. An experienced employee in the organization,
but a novice in their new job assignment or anticipated assignment
for which they are being prepared
| MENTOR
= >
does all 3 roles |
1. A
HELPER ROLE |
1. ORIENTATION,
as appropriate to:
- The Local Site
- The Job & Expectations
- The Organization as Community
- Staff's View of Their Profession
|
<
= GUIDE does one role |
| 2.
A COLLEAGUE |
2.
A FRIEND, LISTENER, & CONFIDANT |
|
| 3.
A MODEL ROLE |
3. CHALLENGING
& FACILITATING THE PROTEGE'S PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
BY:
- Acting as a one-to-one staff developer
- Modeling the continuous search to be
the best employee possible, through openness to learning
and to feed back from others
|
|
Potential Problems
Solved by Providing Two Levels of Mentoring
When the author was a Mentor Program Coordinator (1988-1992)
he also coordinated a separate "Guide Program" which
addressed the needs of experienced but new employees or staff
whose job assignment had changed due to a transfer to a new location
or a change of level. It was discovery of all of the unintended
positive effects of that Guide Program that led the author to
become such a strong advocate of two levels of mentoring,
Potential
Problem |
Solution
Provided By Two Levels of Mentoring |
| 1. Complaints
and grievances about pay and work equity. "I can't believe
I am mentoring a brand new novice and get paid the same stipend
that you get paid (assumes a stipend is paid) when your protege
is so much easier to help 'cause of having much more previous
experience." |
Pay guides
a lower stipend matched to their lower intensity tasks and
shorter duration of responsibilities. Pay mentors a greater
stipend matched to their longer, more intensive roles. |
| 2. Too few
people applying to serve as mentors. "I might consider
being a mentor but I am not sure I can afford the time or
do all that mentors might have to do." |
Experience
in the easier Guide Program serves as a recruitment step for
the Mentoring Program. "Finding the time for peer support
was not the problem I worried it might be because I gained
so much from the experience I hadn't anticipated and I wanted
to give the time to it." Now that I know this, I am considering
being a mentor." |
| 3. Insufficient
availablility of appropriate mentors for the needs of proteges
and a resulting number of less-than-ideal mentor-protege matches.
"We are sorry but we couldn't find a mentor with both
the proximity and job experience to match your needs. The
mentor we had to assign knows your job assignment but is at
a different location. Do the best you can, sorry." |
Assign the
remote mentor with the job experience that matches the protege's
needs, but don't stop there. With two levels of mentoring,
you can also assign the same protege a Guide at the same location
who can assist the protege with the orientation to the local
culture and procedures or to locally unique differences in
expectations. Just be sure the Guide and mentor know who each
other are and they are expected to coordinate their support
of the protege. In other words, when one person is not available
who can meet all the needs, assign two who can. |
A final word - If you do use
a mentor at a location remote to their protege, be SURE to provide:
- Initial, face-to-face training for the pair
and time for them to get to know each other and to plan together
what their work will include, resolve issues of expectations,
such as confidentiality, and begin to "bond".
- Guidance. training and expectations to both
mentor and protege about their use of email, the phone and other
technology to stay in touch on a frequent basis.
Without these two elements, the remote mentoring
likely cannot succeed.
