Using Mentors at Work
Having a mentor in the workplace can be a very helpful thing, especially when just starting out at a company or on a career path. A mentor can either be a formal arrangement within the company or just a friendly, more experienced and generally older person who takes you under their wing and helps you to settle into your place of work and is there to offer advice and support when you need it.
The mentor/mentee relationship is one that can be incredibly enriching for both parties. The mentor benefits from passing on their knowledge and experience to someone who is interested in learning from them and the mentee learns from their experience, knowledge and connections.
It is important to acknowledge that there is an inherent power imbalance in the mentor/mentee relationship and that the relationship between the two should therefore always remain platonic.
Formal Mentoring vs Informal Mentoring
Some workplaces have a mentorship programme which pairs new starts with mentors in order to help them develop their skills and settle in the company. There are pros and cons to both formal and informal mentorships. Informal mentorships allow the relationship between mentor and mentee to develop organically whereas formal mentorship programmes are much more structured and can have more planning of outcomes attached to them.
A mentor shouldn’t be someone who is your direct line manager at your job, as your line manager has accountability for your actions and will rarely encourage you to take a risk on something in order to grow, in a way that a mentor can and should.
Formal Mentoring Programmes
Only 37% of companies have formal mentoring programmes in place, though there are indications that funding is being put aside at many more to start doing this in the future. One of the most difficult things about formal mentorship programmes is that there may not be a good match between the mentor and the mentee. They may just not see eye to eye or not really understand each other all that well.
This disadvantage can be offset by the fact that the mentorship will be structured and have achievable outcomes and goals that will serve both the mentor and the mentee well. The development goals that are pursued in a formal mentorship programme can help a lot with career development and upskilling of the mentee to the point where they are ready to pursue promotion within the company
Informal Mentoring
Informal mentoring usually blossoms from a friendship or from a situation where someone new at the company found someone senior who was willing to answer some questions that they had. This can become a friendship and morph into an informal mentor/mentee relationship, even if neither of the participants would necessarily characterise it as such.
In an informal mentorship, your mentor can be someone from a different team who used to do the kind of work that you are doing now, or someone higher up the food chain at the company, but not your direct line manager. The downside to having an informal mentor is the difficulty in finding one in the first place.
Most senior people don’t often push themselves forward into the informal mentor role without the backing of a formal mentoring programme. This is due in large part to them being aware of the power imbalance that they have with new people who are just starting out at the company.
They want to ensure that they are well clear of any potential allegations that they misused their position in relation to the mentee and this is understandable, given the scandals that have rocked all kinds of industries in recent years including the film industry.
The Benefits of Mentorship
Mentorship is a Key Driver of Success
One of the key indicators that mentorship is considered to be a driver of success is that 70% of Fortune 500 companies have their own mentorship schemes in place. This is a high percentage of some of the most successful companies in the world, and they are not the kind of organisations to make changes to their working practices lightly. If they believe mentorship is a key to success then there is a very good chance that it is. In addition to this, 67% of businesses have reported that mentorship increases productivity.
There are various estimates that people who have experienced mentorship are five times more likely to be promoted than those who don’t. This may be a slightly self-selecting sample in that people who are assigned a mentor may be people that the company has high hopes for and wishes to move to the fast track to promotion anyway. It is difficult to quantify if this is a fair assessment in those circumstances.
Mentorship Boosts Employee Retention
It is thought that mentorship serves to boost employee retention by helping those who are involved in both sides of the mentorship to feel valued and useful in the workplace. Those who are involved in a mentoring relationship are probably less likely to leave in case they let the other down, so it is an astute way of boosting employee retention rates both for newer staff and for the more experienced stalwarts of the company.
Being given a position of respect as a mentor can help people who have been at a company for years feel like they are being valued and that their experience is an asset, whereas otherwise they might have languished and felt like they had ceased to matter as much to the running of the organisation.
Mentees view it as being given access to someone who has done a lot at the company and understands how everything works. Having a mentor can also help to smooth over any problems with their immediate line manager and assist in having any misunderstandings resolved. Having a mentor with some standing at the company can help the mentee to get to know some of the more senior people and to increase their professional network significantly.
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