The
Strategic Mentoring Culture
By Barry Sweeny, © 2008
Formal mentoring programs that have a
high impact on the effectiveness of mentoring, the quality of
work, the success of participants, and attainment of organizational
goals, all have a number of common elements.
Creating such results is why each organization
needs to become a learning community, or as this author asserts,
a Strategic Mentoring Culture.
In a Strategic Mentoring Culture there needs to
be:
- Expert - Novice mentoring at every level of
practice and within the program
- Peer - to - peer mentoring at every level of
practice and within the program
- ONE set of common mentoring strategies implemented
at all five of the levels of the program (see below)
The diagram to the right shows what the first
two elements of that culture are like. Every person should be
involved in both kinds of mentoring, both giving and receiving
support for growth and improvement.
Below on this page is an
illustration of what the complete Strategic Mentoring Culture
looks like. Each arrow represents the dialogue described above.
Examples of Each Kind of Strategy
- Program Strategies include how an organization:
- Recruits and selects mentors
- Matches mentors and proteges, and resolves
mismatches
- Trains mentors for their role
- Provides on-going support for mentors
- Evaluates and continually improves the
mentoring program.
- Leadership - Mentoring of Mentors Strategies
are:
- Who has a formal role in coordinating the
program
- Who supports mentors and holds them accountable
for continually improvement
- How these persons model effective mentoring
in their daily work
- Mentoring strategies include how mentors:
- Build safe, trusting, relationships with
their proteges
- Promote protege development
- Provide positive, but challenging feed
back
- Help a protege become and remain open to
external feed back
- Assess what a protege needs for their developmental
level
- Design mentoring interventions that are
developmentally appropriate
- Working strategies are the ways experts
in a job or role work to effectively accomplish what is expected
of that role. These might include how:
- Teachers teach students
- Managers supervise subordinates
- To lead effective group meetings
- To lead a strategic planning process
- Client strategies are those done by
the persons with whom employees work, and could include:
- What students do to learn effectively
- What customers do within effective sales
relationships
- What employees do in relationship with
their supervisors
In a Strategic Mentoring Culture, all these strategic
levels are intentionally designed to support learning and improved
performance. When fully implemented and working together a magical
synergy develops that accelerates individual and organizational
improvement and effectiveness.
BOTH Formal AND Informal Mentoring?
Yes. In powerful, effective, learning organizations
there are:
Formal "Mentors", to assure that:
- The team of colleagues and the supervisor of
a protégé are effectively supporting the protégé
- The needs of the protégé are
assessed and addressed, AND...
- Not even ONE employee is left alone to learn
by trial and error.
Every powerful, effective, learning organization
also uses...
Informal "mentoring" which is:
- What everyone does to ensure their own continued
growth, and...
- What everyone does to support the growth of
others.
Add together formal and informal mentoring and the
two types of mentoring dialogue, and what you have is a "Strategic
Mentoring Culture" in which everyone is growing, improving,
and supporting each other. It is a true learning community which
is continually improving.
Where Do We Start?
Most programs begin their mentoring efforts at one of
the levels illustrated in the Strategic Mentoring Culture diagram.
Such an approach is both logical and practical. To become effective
quickly, we must KNOW the bigger picture of mentoring that we
eventually need to develop, but we need to START by taking small,
calculated steps to patiently build readiness for and the capacity
needed to move toward such a mentoring culture over time.
Where we start is not all that important, as successful
programs of all types have begun at many different places.
- If development and retention of new, novice
employees are the greatest challenge for your organization,
start with an orientation and induction focused mentoring program
to ensure their early career success and, a short learning curve
with quick productivity. In that case, your mentoring will focus
initially at the "mentoring strategies" (#3) and "working
strategies" (#2) levels. Eventually, as the protégé
masters the basic tasks of effective employees, your focus should
shift to include the effective "client strategies"
(customer) level as well.
- Perhaps you want to ensure that middle managers
are retained and that they build the skills needed to ensure
a strong "pool" of high performing candidates for
upper management positions. In that case, you will start a management
level mentoring program in which executives at the leadership
level (#4) of the Strategic Mentoring Culture are trained to
and serve as mentors of the middle managers. Eventually, as
middle mangers are successful with their tasks as managers (the
working level #2), you should shift to include two other mentoring
levels:
- Development of those skills in middle mangers
which will make them more effective in assessing and addressing
client or customer level needs.
- Development of the middle managers as mentors
(#3) so they can, in turn, develop their direct reports
and other subordinates whom they supervise.
- The ideal way to build a Strategic Mentoring
Culture is to start at the top of that diagram and work
your way down, creating and building success at each of the
upper levels before moving on. However, to succeed the first
time with such a terrific and logical approach requires considerable
foreknowledge of what is going to happen at the other levels
before it happens. Otherwise how could you prepare people at
the higher levels to be successful later at lower levels when
those lower levels are as yet uncreated and you have no experience
working at those lower levels yet?
- The answer is to employ an expert mentoring
consultant and trainer who has worked with these levels
before, who knows what to anticipate and how to solve the usual
and unexpected problems before they have even happened, and
who can MENTOR your leadership and program. In other words,
if YOU don't have the foreknowledge, because you haven't yet
had the experience by which you could have learned it, you should
work under the guidance of someone who HAS had these experiences
and whose wisdom can help you avoid the time-wasting, painful
process of trial and error learning.
ONE Core Mentoring Strategy
No matter where you start to build the Strategic Mentoring Culture
in your organization, as you have opportunities, also build mentoring
at the other levels of the culture and in your program. However,
make very sure that the mentoring that happens at every level
is the SAME highly effective mentoring process. The content
of the conversation will change, but the mentoring strategies
should remain the same at every level of the program and organization.
Doing so is a recognition that all development at any level works
the same core way. Doing this also makes sure that the lessons
learned at any one level can be immediately and directly applied
to the work at all levels so everyone benefits from the learning
of anyone person.
As complex as it is to make that simple statement a reality,
the best way to ensure it CAN happen is the use of one core mentoring
strategy -"The Essential Mentoring
Strategy", which everyone at every level needs to use.
