Mentoring is a reciprocal and collaborative at-will relationship that most often occurs between a senior and junior employee for the purpose of the mentee’s growth, learning, and career development. Often the mentor and mentee are internal to an organization, and there is an emphasis on organizational goals, culture, career goals, advice on professional development, and work-life balance. Effective mentors often act as role models and sounding boards for their mentee and provide guidance to help them reach their goals.
Mentorship stands for structured
guidance, provided by a more experienced person to a junior trainee. Mentoring
can be further defined as ‘support and encouragement of someone to manage
their own learning so that they may maximize their potential, develop their
skills, improve their performance and become the person they want to be.’
Formal mentoring programs – organization-assisted matching between a mentor and a protégé, usually short term – are a way of helping newcomers learn the ropes and/or assisting more junior employees to advance in their careers. What is perhaps less common is for these formal mentoring relationships to advance and become strong long-term work connections, as may be the case with informal mentoring – when we naturally gravitate to mentor someone.
What’s critical to make the formal mentoring program more beneficial is to promote holistic exchange instead of strict mentoring guidelines. Many formal mentoring programs come with a set of guidelines that mentoring partners may be asked to follow. However, successful formal mentoring relationships work at lowering the initial uncertainty when meeting someone new. This entails partners' willingness to openly share their previous career journey early on in the formal mentoring relationship. Thus, approaching a new mentoring relationship in a more holistic fashion and being open to sharing one's background more broadly are some of the key characteristics of successful formal mentoring.
Constructing Reciprocal Relationships
We typically think of a mentor as someone in a more senior or leadership role for example, while the protégé would be a more junior employee wishing to advance in the organization. This traditional type of structure often creates certain power dynamics where the mentor is seen as the "guru" and the protégé is there to learn from him/her. However, the best relationships are those that foster mutual exchange, no matter the rank in the organization. The greatest amount of learning and strongest relationships seem to be those where mentoring partners take turns in terms of knowledge exchange and there is clear reciprocity (i.e., partners responded to the needs of each other) and learning happens on both sides. Thus, formal mentoring programs should foster the idea that both partners are equal contributors and only when sharing and learning is reciprocal can these relationships grow into more positive and long-lasting relationships.
Definitions Of Coaching, Consulting, Mentoring And Training
One person might call themselves a coach, but
really what they’re doing is training. Another might be a consultant but
they’ve labelled their service as mentorship. Here’s a quick overview of each.
Challenges in Creating a Mentoring Program
Implementing a formalized mentorship program
sounds good, but it can have a real downside: that of Power. The idea here
is that a senior person would pair with a junior and mentor them about all
things. The problem is that those same senior members assigned as mentors will
be making decisions about the future of the junior when it comes time for
promotion and tenure. And it’s unlikely that they will spend a great deal
of time reflecting on whether they did a good job mentoring a
particular recruit as the promotion file is being evaluated.
Mentorship May Fall Into Two Categories: Forced & Organic.
Forced mentorship is often the kind that exists in “programs” aimed at helping junior people work through the complex power and policy structures that exist in an organization. The problem is that the person doing the mentoring is usually also embedded in those structures and, in fact, may be both symbolically and practically someone who holds power over junior employees. Here, the junior person is unlikely to query about or raise issues that may be controversial or that might suggest anything negative about the organization.
In other words, forced mentoring
programs may look good on paper, because they make it appear as though
an organization is enacting policies and procedures to help junior employees
succeed and develop in their careers, but the basic power structures in any
organization are likely to actually work against open and honest
communication between assigned mentor and mentee.
Organic mentoring relationships are much more likely to bear fruit because they are grounded in a sense of mutual trust that emerges as the relationship develops over time. This is particularly true if the relationship involves a mentor outside of the organization in which the mentee works—that can mean another company or even just another division within a company. If the relationship develops naturally, there is a good potential for the mentee to gain knowledge and insight that will help, because the mentee will feel empowered to raise difficult issues should they arise.
Programs that assign mentoring relationships
within an organizational structure are more likely to reinforce power
relationships and cause individuals who lack power to avoid interactions with
senior staff. Creating opportunities for relationships with senior
individuals that can arise organically, and that are not within one’s
immediate group or division, has the potential for generating good mentoring.
One way to do this is to create opportunities for people to informally
and voluntarily be paired on the basis of common interest or expertise.
A website where potential mentors and mentees can connect has potential to
accomplish this without creating a program. But it’s necessary that the
mentees’ direct supervisors are not involved and have no knowledge of who is
mentoring. Before implementing the system, we need to determine how necessary
it is. Usually, mentoring systems are essential in the following cases:
***To be continued in Chapter 02 (Impressive Corporate Mentorship Programs That Worked, A Mentor’s Toolkit, Common Mistakes)
LINK TO CHAPTER - 02:
https://conceptsnest.blogspot.com/2024/12/effective-formal-mentoring-proven_17.html
Content Curated By: Dr Shoury Kuttappa
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