Mentoring: Not just a lone entré from a limited menu

There’s a classic vision of the workplace mentor: a wise old veteran of office politics and career-ladder climbing, putting an arm around a rookie or buying a drink for a newcomer, telling it “like it is.”

There’s a lot to be said for that vision, and I’ll come back to it in a moment. But in a broader sense, mentoring is really so much more. It’s not about the status of people; it’s about the nature of the interaction.

If I had to encapsulate mentoring in a phrase, this would be the phrase: “listening and learning.” And a good way to understand what I mean by that, and to understand why the classic vision is perhaps too narrow, is to consider something that’s been catching on in organizations: reverse mentoring.

Reverse mentoring flips the classic vision on its head: it’s the rookie putting a figurative arm around the veteran, explaining how things have changed. It’s the young recruit explaining to the old office hand the value of Instagram, artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, and a host of other cutting-edge innovations that are changing the way business is done. It’s the novice doing the talking, and the wise old sage doing the listening (and the learning) about something new.

When you think about reverse mentoring, you begin to understand a valuable principle for every organization to recognize: even at a single point in time, everyone in the organization can be a mentor, and everyone can benefit from having a mentor. Listening and learning, from those with a different perspective or an alternate base of knowledge, leads to healthy and dynamic organizations.

Of course, all that being said, the classic vision still predominates. A new employee, whether fresh out of school or simply new to the organization, wants to get a handle on things like workplace culture, hierarchies that exist in reality versus those that exist on paper, qualities that lead to advancement, ways to get things done that perhaps aren’t immediately apparent from perusal of the office manual. Who are the movers and shakers? Who can you count on? Where can you get help? When should you speak up, and when should you shut up?

All those questions have answers, but they’re not found in a textbook or an internal memo or a poster on the wall. They’re the intangibles, and perhaps that suggests another phrase one might use to describe mentoring: making the intangibles tangible for the uninitiated.

So—is mentoring something new, the latest business fad? No, mentoring has always been with us, though for generations kept largely informal despite its readily apparent value. But these days there are advocates at all levels in companies of all sizes, and that old informal and haphazard process is being replaced by formal mentoring programs and procedures. No longer is finding a mentor simply serendipitous; now efforts are being made to bring structure to the search.

And the new formalized programs are very popular, particularly with younger and newer employees. Indeed, surveys show that access to a mentor is as important to unseasoned employees as higher wages or longer vacations or other typical benefits of employment. Beginners want to learn. And for organizations, finding ways to match mentors with mentees is becoming a priority—it raises retention rates, and strengthens the organization.

So whether your organization’s goal is to foster the classic vision of mentorship, or one of the many variations—perhaps reverse mentoring, but also peer-to-peer mentoring (valuable for information-sharing and commiseration), executive mentoring (designed to prepare elite employees to become leaders), outside mentoring (where employees mentor, for example, high school students in STEM or finance or other business-related disciplines), mentoring circles (where a single mentor interacts with a group of mentees), or virtual mentoring (where the relationship is with a mentor in a remote location)—the time is right to approach mentoring not as an offhanded offshoot of casual contacts but rather as a concrete target of a specific program.

And Garnet River can help you create such a program, navigating through such things as sifting through the many types of software designed to match mentors with mentees, or identifying how and when mentoring should take place (during work hours? after hours? for how long?), as well as the challenge of defining the breadth and scope of your program. There’s a smorgasbord of options, and Garnet River can help guide you to the right choices.

I look forward to hearing from you!