The concept of mentoring is anything but new: Homer’s The Odyssey, which was written in the 8th century BCE, features the character Mentor who acts as a guide to both Odysseus and his son. Fast forward to the present day and individuals are increasingly realising the benefits of forming partnerships to facilitate the sharing of technical information, institutional knowledge and insight within a particular occupation or company. Business leaders, too, are seeing the advantages that mentoring schemes can bring.
A survey by Deloitte reveals that millennials planning on staying with their employer for more than five years are 68% more likely to have a mentor than the 32% who are not. Elsewhere, 77% of companies that have a mentoring programme indicate that it improved both employee retention and job performance.
For HR leaders, creating or joining a mentoring programme is a powerful way to help your people develop both personally and professionally. But what are the wider organisational benefits, and how are these schemes best approached?
In today’s skills-scarce market, where access to fresh talent is increasingly challenging, mentorship offers companies a means to independently widen their skills base and competencies in line with strategic goals. These schemes also enable businesses to build and maintain robust talent pipelines to develop a mature management population which aids future succession planning.
The personal knowledge gained through mentorship quickly and directly translates into organisational insight, not only for long-term gain, but also short-term benefits. Research by the National Mentoring Day Summit has found that 67% of businesses reported an increase in productivity due to mentoring. The same research also reveals that 55% of businesses consider mentoring to have a positive impact on their company’s profits.
Mentoring can also help increase employee engagement, development and retention. According to the CNBC Workplace Happiness Survey, nine in 10 workers who have a career mentor say they are happy in their jobs. Conversely, more than four in 10 workers who don’t have a mentor say they’ve considered quitting their job in the past three months.
The value of mentorship shows up in more specific ways as well. Workers with a mentor are more likely than those without to say they’re well paid (79% vs. 69%) and to believe that their contributions are valued by their colleagues (89% vs. 75%) — two key components of overall happiness at work.
In addition, mentoring can help boost diversity at senior level through matching individuals from underrepresented groups with leaders who have overcome the odds to forge out a position at the top – enabling them to share their experiences and offer practical advice. Finally, the involvement in mentoring programmes helps enhance your employer brand by sending a powerful message that you are committed to investing in your people.
Unlike traditional training courses, mentoring opportunities enable your people to learn not only technical skills and tried and tested management techniques, but also social skills and behavioural nuances that simply cannot be taught in a classroom or through an online training programme.
Contrary to popular perception, these programmes are also mutually beneficial to both parties. The mentee, of course, has the opportunity to learn their craft from a true business leader, who can offer first-hand, personalised guidance to the more junior partner. However, the mentor also benefits from a unique opportunity for self-reflection and the satisfaction of ‘giving back’.
Academics McKimm, Jollie and Hatter (2007) list the benefits of mentoring from the mentors perspective. These include: improves awareness of own learning gaps; develops ability to give and take criticism; and develops up-todate organisational and professional knowledge.
As Hattie Duffield, who mentors through APSCo’s EmpowerMe professional development programme, highlights, “I feel mentoring gives you another perspective – you are put in a safe space where you feel empowered”. Another of APSCo’s mentors, Lysha Holmes, notes that, “The mentor benefits from a programme like this as well. It makes you realise how much you have to give – no matter what background you’re from or what size business you run… it takes just an hour a month of your time, but the outputs are immense. To see a young person grow personally and professionally is a huge reward that everyone should have the chance to experience.”
Whether you choose to host a mentoring programme in-house, or decide to join an existing scheme, ensuring that the endeavour is well run and sufficiently monitored is crucial. It is worth noting that both options bring unique benefits: internal programmes are well suited to knowledge transfer where disseminating company ethos and corporate culture are key. External programmes, on the other hand, are often thought to be conducive to a more open and honest environment, with mentees feeling free to voice concerns and criticisms surrounding colleagues. Inter-company partnerships also facilitate sector-wide knowledge transfer, which can benefit your business and your wider discipline long-term.
However you choose to facilitate mentoring opportunities for your people, it is important to begin by communicating the benefits to those who will take on the mentor role. Becoming a mentor affords the individual the opportunity to develop their communication and personal skills while at the same time achieving a sense of real fulfilment. It can be a great addition to leadership skills development and can help you develop your managers and aspiring leaders into mentors in their own right.
After this, the magic is in the matching, and making sure that partners are chosen based on their individual experiences, career paths and personal goals can ensure that both parties squeeze the most out of the opportunity.
A role as a mentor will cover at least some of the following: listening and asking the right questions; providing personal insights of your experience of the sector and your career; offering a different point of view; gifting development advice and guidance as well as support and encouragement; helping the mentee identify areas for growth and development; and giving positive reinforcement and constructive feedback. And while the relationships built through these schemes will all inevitably create and take their own paths, monitoring and reporting progress to enable a feedback loop is key. Goal tracking tools can be harnessed to measure and manage relationships and both mentor and mentees should be encouraged to log and share sessions, actions and lessons learned. Technology should also be utilised to make mentoring communication and organisation as simple as possible.
Here at APSCo, we know that employers in our sector want to drive performance and empower their people to be ambitious – that’s why we launched EmpowerMe, to give the profession access to a one-to-one career enhancing personal development programme which will help drive performance and increase the confidence of people at every level. By facilitating long-term, tailored development in the form of mentoring, HR leaders in every sector can enhance the level of expertise within their organisations to boost long term staff engagement, innovation and profitability, and isn’t that what we all want in this day and age?
