Problems and Promise: Mentoring programs

Mentoring is a very popular approach to developing talent from within an organization. It helps leverage the hidden wisdom and knowledge of senior managers, making those otherwise perishable qualities, in a way, meaningfully resident components of the firm. In encourages and socializes young managers and guides them through challenges at various points in their careers in a way that enables them to grow from the experiences and learn the proper lessons, rather than become confused and dispirited.

But, as a recent BusinessWeek Online article points out, like any other potentially valuable program, mentoring has to be carefully considered and managed in order to provide these benefits. If it isn’t, not only could it fail to deliver on its promise - it could even become an actively corrosive presence in the organization.

Mentoring relationships are, after all, relationships - to have even a chance at success they must be carefully and thoughtfully arranged, and the parties to them need to work hard to keep them healthy and mutually productive. Mentors must be chosen who highlight the best values of the industry, the profession, and the firm. Mind you, not all do - many are chosen as mentors based on the hope that they will teach others to replicate their own records for outputs such as their sales numbers or budget efficiency. Sometimes, though, the juniors mentored by such managers may discover an unpleasant underside to such results that reflects poorly on the mentors, and on the rest of the firm that is unaware of what sorts of behaviors are producing those results.

On the other hand, there can be manipulative behavior involved that can poison the program. Mentors may view juniors assigned to them essentially as interns, and use them as off-budget adjunct staff, with little reward for their contributions. Juniors, on the other hand, have been known to use the relationship with their mentors to ruthlessly advance their own careers, sometimes even cynically betraying information - even personal information - relayed to them with the aim of informing a teaching point, in order to gain personally.

Mentoring programs have great potential and are strongly encouraged. However, there is no magic formula to running a firm or solving its managerial problems - there are only thoughtfully developed programs operated with practiced judgment, supervision, and an eye to their purpose.

It’s not just that there is no reward without risk; there is none without investment, either - in this case, the time and effort of management.

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