The value of mentorship
Recent trends in managerial learning emphasise the critical role of on-the-job relationships in career development. These are often formal and informal developmental relationships, which occur naturally in the workplace between less-experienced managers and senior managers, peers, or subordinates.
Advertisement
Such relationships provide a variety of assistance including mentoring, feedback, counselling, coaching, sponsoring, skill-building, preparation for advancement, role-modeling, and reinforcement.
Developments in the business climate today such as the introduction of new technology, intense competition and changing demographics have decreased opportunities for both formal and informal developmental relationships (mentorship) within the internal system of the organisation.
However, some managers want ‘already-made’ employees who will meet their requirement of vacant positions placed in the media.
The sad issue is that management spends so much money to place advertisements to recruit staff to fill vacancies while staff get stuck down the line in their permanent position till retirement without being mentored to assume those positions.
Often management’s mantra has been - “maximising profit and minimising liabilities cost,” but these same managers spend so much on training and growing new staff where on-the-job development relationship and skill-building would be better and cheaper.
Again, senior managers are left to retire and leave with skills and experience without mentoring their subordinates to facilitate continuity of expertise.
Accordingly, neglect of the issues unique to the role of the mentor leaves a critical gap in the understanding of the overall mentorship process and hampers theoretical and practical development of the field.
Mentoring relationship is an inherently complex process, with the mentor and the protégé each enacting different roles and responsibilities in the relationship. The success of any mentorship is dependent on the behaviour of both the mentor and the protégé.
It is an ongoing event as opposed to a one-time event. Successful mentoring is characterised by shared responsibility among the mentor, the protégés, and the protégés’ managers.
From a practical perspective, mentors play a key role in organisations as they ensure the transfer and continuation of knowledge and help prepare junior colleagues for further organisational responsibility. Also, they help to communicate honestly and openly with the protégé.
They treat the relationship with the protégé as a learning opportunity and also take the time to get to know the protégé. Mentors help explain differences in the career advancement of colleagues.
Mentorship and maintenance should be seen as an effective management tool aimed at helping newly employed staff to conform to the organisational culture.
Mentors share successes and failures as well as real-life stories that can offer insight to protégés.
It is argued that organisations need to shift their collective mind-set about learning from one that is reductionist in nature (viewing mentoring as a one-time, one-on-one relationship) to one that encourages expansionist thinking.
This new mind-set redefines formal mentoring as organisational initiatives to involve groups of employees led by organisational veterans who are networked with the employees’ immediate managers.
The new approach creates a partnership among participants, learning leaders, and supervisors that is based on empowerment and shared responsibility for the learning and growth that takes place in the organisations.
