Mentor capital: Growing a company’s most precious resource

An organisation’s ability to mentor or coach employees is a corporate asset. Mentoring capital is just as important to an organisation as its cash reserves. If you invest carefully in creating a strong mentoring environment, then the returns can be very high, writes Sid Fuchs

Mentors can provide a number of valuable functions within any business group: role model, teacher, listener, coach, and all-around supporter. Mentoring can also assume many different forms, but fundamentally, a mentor’s job is to enable others by sharing experience and knowledge. It is widely acknowledged that an organisation’s ability to mentor or coach others is a corporate asset, so logically, we would expect most companies to make teaching others an integral part of their culture. If they invest working capital (cash, for example) to maximize its worth and help drive their business, why wouldn’t they do the same with their people?

Building a mentoring environment
If your company already has core values that encourage mentoring, then a well-conceived programme might strengthen good practices that are already in place and create a more effective mentoring environment.

To establish a mentoring programme, start with the end in mind. Do you want to create an environment that grooms future managers, or one that improves skills, confidence, and ability within people’s current positions? It’s important to anticipate the needs of those who want to cross disciplines: engineers who want to be in sales, product managers who want to be field consultants, and so on. For those engineers, for example, it would make sense to assign a mentor who works with salespeople rather than match them with another engineer.

Mentoring fundamentals
No matter what mentoring approach you decide to use, you’ll want to keep a few fundamentals in mind. In general, good mentors do the following:

• Facilitate thinking instead of giving the answer: Good mentors make you think, form your own conclusion, and then execute. They see themselves as facilitators and drivers.
• Encourage teams to take risks: Mentors push teams to experiment with new approaches and to rely on their instincts and experience to move in new directions—as opposed to always doing things the same way, or relying too heavily on numbers to drive a decision.
• Allow themselves to be vulnerable: Leaders who don’t put up a shield that protects them from making a mistake (or from simply revealing that they are human and don’t know everything), make it easier for their teams to build trust up the chain of command.
• Make team members feel responsible for everyone’s success: The goal of any mentoring programme should be to make many people, and not just the manager, feel responsible for every team member’s individual success as well as the team’s success overall.

Benefits of a mentoring environment
Noel Tichy, author of The Leadership Engine, says that all effective leaders strive to create mentoring environments within their organisations and teach others. There are many obvious reasons why this is advantageous:

• Promotes creativity and risk-taking: In cultures where trust is lacking, people go into “protective mode”; they act only to ensure self-preservation.
• Smoothes out the dips: Good mentoring can produce an organisation consisting of people who are of the same page, capable of making the right decisions without being micro-managed, and able to execute both within a team and as individuals.
• Attracts the right people: Winners like to be with winners. If you create an environment with a high level of trust and a high sense of mission and purpose, and if you give people the opportunity not only to reap financial rewards but also to grow as individuals, then you will attract people who appreciate and respond to those opportunities.
• Ensures long-term survival: In Good to Great, Jim Collins says that companies which have charismatic leaders do very well while that leader is running the show but begin to stumble after the leader goes. The reason? Charismatic leaders often force their people to do what he/she believes is right instead of what is actually right for the company.

Who should mentor?
Mentors don’t have to be managers. When people come seeking advice and wisdom, it doesn’t matter where you sit, how much money you make, or how fancy your title is. What matters most is a willingness to listen, give advice, provide feedback, and take a genuine interest in a co-worker’s situation.

Generally, effective mentors do the following:

• Share a teachable point of view: Not all great athletes make great coaches, and the same can be said about knowledgeable, experienced employees vis à vis mentoring. For software development organisations, it helps if the mentor has worked on various types of projects with different kinds of drivers and constraints.
• Provide honest and direct feedback: Some people avoid giving honest feedback because they want to avoid confrontation. To be of any help, however, a mentor must be able to tell people what they’re doing wrong and provide constructive suggestions about how to correct it. n Exercise patience and discretion: The last thing anyone wants or needs when they’re in a tough situation is to have someone broadcasting their issues throughout the organisation. Mentors need to make sure they keep things to themselves and do not violate the trust of people they are advising. Being patient is also a key requirement when you take on the task of helping others.
• Understand the organisation and how to navigate. Any situation involving a number of people includes dynamics that need to be understood and appreciated. It takes a wise and experienced person to recognise that people and organisations are not always driven by the obvious demands of quality, schedule, and so on; they might be trying to comply with secondary factors such as company culture, fear of change/failure, and risk mitigation.

Sound investment, high returns
Mentoring capital is just as important to an organisation as its cash reserves. If you invest carefully in creating a strong mentoring environment, then the returns can be very high for mentors, for those they advise, and especially for the organisation as a whole. A sound mentoring programme can bring about improvements in capability, performance, communication, and team dynamics. It can also help those who mentor by teaching them how to lead more effectively and giving them a chance to make a positive contribution to the overall good of the organisation.

(Sid Fuchs is director of professional services, Strategic Services Organisation, Rational Software)