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Mentoring as a business tool can deliver increased return on investment when organisations understand and support the fundamentals of mentoring relationships.

Mentoring in business is a hot topic at the moment. One of the things we do at WorldsView is leadership development, which is where mentoring comes in: leaders can develop with the help of a mentor, and leaders can be a mentor to others.

In its pure form, mentoring seems like a great tool. Two people form a mutually beneficial bond: the less experienced person gets advice, wisdom, and a helping hand; the more experienced person, the satisfaction of having helped someone overcome an obstacle.

Historical accounts of mentoring point out some other characteristics: the individuals often have similar occupations; there is no tangible reward to being a mentor; the scope of the mentoring relationship is development of the whole person, not just skill-building; and an individual usually has just one most-influential mentor for a given challenge. The benefits of mentoring, for someone who finds a good teacher, are vast – people tell of confidence they gained from their mentor, new perspectives, or the courage to stick to a task.

So, mentoring can be useful. People with mentors could logically be expected to do better than those without. The world of business has started adapting mentoring to its needs for just this reason. The question is, what parts of mentoring can be adapted to fit the need, and what parts are not negotiable?

It is easy to imagine how ignoring some fundamental aspect of mentoring might cause failure. If the mentor does not have enough experience to share, then the relationship might fail from lack of development. If the individuals are from backgrounds that are too different, they might not relate well to each other. If the scope of the relationship is limited in some way, the pair might miss valuable development opportunities.

These possible points of failure are all related to the fundamental characteristics of mentoring. If a company chooses to implement a mentoring programme, I would recommend leaving the fundamentals intact. Relationships should be one-on-one, between individuals from similar backgrounds, but with differing levels of experience. In my opinion, no money should change hands, and the relationship should be allowed to find its own course. With these fundamentals in place, a formal mentoring programme should have a better than average chance of succeeding. Within these bounds, there is plenty of room for experimentation.

Try some of these ideas to encourage and formalise the mentoring process:

Connect people. Identify employees in need of guidance and set up meetings in which they can meet potential mentors. These meetings could be one-on-one or group based.

Make time for mentoring pairs to meet. If individuals are prevented from meeting regularly due to business pressures, then the mentoring relationship will be less likely to survive. The company can improve its chances by creating a favourable environment for mentoring meetings.

Track progress. Ask “How many relationships have formed, and are they being sustained?” By creating many mentoring relationships in a company, the opportunities for development are multiplied, and that is a worthwhile achievement.

By keeping these principles in mind, mentoring can be used as a business tool. Certainly, the tool has its limitations and success cannot be predicted very accurately, but by sticking to the fundamentals, a useful mentoring programme can be implemented.

Simon Alcock,
Consultant