Mentors help careers soar – More companies setting up pairings for employees

Lolita Walker didn’t need to clamor for a spot on the new season of The Apprentice to find a mentor in the business world. Out of college for nearly five years, she’s already forged relationships with eight people willing to help her navigate her career.

Stacy A. Teicher
Christian Science Monitor

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/business/articles/1023mentor23.html

"Everyone should have a mentor in their company; everyone needs a soldier in the field – someone to brag about you when you’re not there, someone who has your best interests at heart," she said with the fervor of an evangelist.

Not everyone has Walker’s knack for networking, but the demand for mentor relationships is growing. In response, some companies have set up formal pairings, at times resembling a dating service in the care they take to find the right match. Others give groups of new hires a peer mentor to show them the ropes. Even on the executive level, companies don’t want people’s leadership aspirations to wither on the vine for lack of guidance.
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"The topic is on the tip of the tongues of most managers and executives because retention is a critical issue, and one of the key elements of retention is mentoring," said Myrna Marofsky, co-author of Getting Started with Mentoring and president of ProGroup, a diversity consultancy in Minneapolis. "What used to be an informal process has now been formalized . . . and linked to the company’s business objectives."

Take Gen Xers, the employees in their late 20s and 30s who don’t exactly have a reputation for loyalty. Even they feel at least "indirect loyalty" when they form good relationships with co-workers and managers, according to a survey by BridgeWorks, a consulting company focused on generational issues in the workplace. More than 40 percent of Gen Xers in its survey said that having a mentor directly influenced their decision to stay at a company.

"When you feel there’s somebody there who cares . . . who can help out in your development personally and professionally, it makes people stay," said Walker, an engineer at Gillette in Boston.

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Finding a mentor

How to find a mentor when the company won’t do it for you:

• Think strategically about whom to approach. If your goal is to learn about career paths in the company, choose a mentor who has already advanced at least a few levels beyond your own. And find out who has a reputation for helping those who don’t work directly for them. If you want advice on general issues such as handling conflict or balancing work and family, you might find a mentor from a different company or another field altogether.

• Tell your mentor-to-be what you admire most about him or her, what you hope to gain from the mentoring, and the structure you propose, such as talking once a month for six months or a year.

• Once the mentoring is under way, "be willing to listen," says John Parks, a plant manager for Gillette in Lancaster, S.C., who has mentored a wide range of people. The learner needs "a willingness to take to heart what’s being shared."

• Reciprocate. You may think you don’t have enough experience to be a mentor, but chances are someone is eager to learn from you, even if just to avoid making the mistakes you learned the hard way.

Source: Christian Science Monitor

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Corporate success has traditionally depended on informal bonds, but not everyone has had access to the unwritten rules, Marofsky says. That’s why many firms now link mentoring programs to diversity initiatives.

"We work with organizations to go below the surface, to say, ‘Who are you missing in the pool of up-and-comers?’ " she said. ProGroup also provides tools to guide dialogue between mentors and their proteges, because once people are paired up, they often are at a loss for what to talk about.

Efforts to measure the effects of career mentoring are relatively new. Catalyst, a non-profit research group in New York, tracked a large group of professional women of color from 1998 to 2001 and found that 69 percent of those who had a mentor had been promoted, compared with 49 percent of those who didn’t. The study also showed the growing popularity of mentoring, with the portion of women with mentors rising from 35 percent to 58 percent.

One challenge for companies, however, is finding enough people willing to commit the time to be a mentor, Marofsky says. And the higher one climbs, the fewer people there are above to choose from. This summer, Catalyst found that only a minority of senior-level women (17 percent) and men (23 percent) in Fortune 1000 companies are satisfied with the availability of mentors.