As submitted to The Current, 2009
Byline: Susan deGrandpré is the owner and principal consultant of Collaboration Consulting. She is a member of the Association for Consulting Expertise, Human Resources Association of Southern Maine, and the Portland Regional Chamber. She can be contacted at Susan@CollaborationConsulting.biz
Workplace Mentoring: Sharing knowledge is power.
The economy remains difficult. You have employees who are grateful to still be employees, but they are more than a little distracted by what is going on around them. This is the third in a series of four articles to give you basic strategies to engage and inspire them to be productive in the face of uncertainty.
Strategy Number Three is to spread the knowledge wealth.
Doing more with fewer people is a theme of the times. Businesses need employees to know more, make better decisions, and work more productively. Workplace mentoring can be a powerful answer to filling those needs.
Your employees are talented, enthusiastic and feel a stake in your business’s success. They can learn from you and each other. This is the foundation for increasing the capacity of your business through workplace mentoring.
Workplace mentoring is an explicit one-to-one learning relationship between someone who wants to expand job or career skills and someone who can help her do that. The mentee could be a newly hired person or a seasoned employee. The mentor is much more than an answer person. The mentor invests in another’s development. She shares knowledge, encouragement, guidance and feedback. She advocates for the mentee’s success. The mentoring relationship extends over time, changing with the increasing experience and confidence of the mentee. In a rich workplace mentoring culture, people are likely to be mentors and mentees at the same time. Mentoring crosses functional and hierarchical boundaries. Sharing knowledge is the norm. People are eager to teach, eager to learn.
Mentees learn quickly because attention is individualized. Mentors develop teaching and coaching skills. Mentees and mentors take mutual responsibility for their success and the business’s success. Mentoring is an investment of time, but businesses find that payoffs include increased quality of work, employee loyalty and teamwork.
There is no “cookie-cutter” approach to mentoring. Businesses evolve their mentoring processes according to the organization’s and learners’ needs. Workplace mentoring programs, though, have fundamental components in common. I call these the Six Building Blocks of Successful Workplace Mentoring. I challenge you to start your workplace mentoring program by using these building blocks with just one mentee and one mentor. Encourage and support their work together. Watch the power grow.
1. Evaluate strengths, needs and aspirations on an individual basis. The mentor tailors learning to the mentee’s unique qualities.
2. Create opportunities to learn on the job. Just-in-time, applied learning is most efficient.
3. Define teaching and learning roles. Set clear expectations, goals and responsibilities. Review and refine continuously.
4. Give direct feedback. The mentor and mentee coach each other on what is working well and what could be improved.
5. Measure learning. Set measurements that note frequent and meaningful progress towards benchmarks.
6. Reward the team effort. Reward both mentors and mentees. Celebrate the power of workplace mentoring. Share the knowledge.
Tags: coaching, feedback, knowledge capital, mentoring, onboarding, teaching, teamwork
