MENTORING FOR SUCCESS
Since 1985, when Dr. Kathy Kram’s seminal “Mentoring at Work” focused attention on the subject, researchers have identified a variety of beneficial outcomes from mentoring programs, including increased job satisfaction, lower turnover, greater recruiting appeal and more rapid career growth.
Strong trust facilitates all areas of mentor- ing, from exploring performance strengths and weaknesses to giving and receiving beneficial feedback. Trust that’s founded on similar personalities and mutual interests
is often the greatest difference
between informal and formal mentor- ing relationships. I liken the situation for formal programs to trying to build an arti- ficial reef for trust to settle and grow upon. Administrators need to do all they can to make conditions on the artificial reef even better than those on naturally occurring informal mentoring reefs.
Orientation training helps build trust in several ways. If the mentoring pair is meeting for the first time, the training is a shared experience that can bring them closer. Second, trust-building exercises and icebreakers can specifically be included as part of the training. Tird, the training can address skills intended to facilitate respectful communications between men- tee and mentor, including active listening, giving and receiving feedback, negotia- tions and having crucial conversations, for example, conversations where the stakes are high and likely to become emotional. Orientation training should also include trust-building tips like learning and remembering personal details and special occasions such as birthdays and anniver- saries, striving to overdeliver on personal commitments and occasionally meeting outside the confines of the workplace, if both mentee and mentor are comfortable with a change in setting.
Goal achievement is another important topic for orientation training. While
136 mentors often benefit from the experi-
ence, the explicit aim of a mentoring relationship is usually to achieve goals of significance to the mentee, with new goals being set as earlier ones are achieved. Te process becomes iterative with recurring steps like goal identification, attempted breakthroughs, refection on the attempts and evaluation of new goals. Orienta- tion training explores this process along with the skills needed by mentees and mentors at each step. A best practice is to train in setting SMART goals—“specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-related.”
A final activity the mentoring program administrator must accomplish is collect- ing and interpreting results. Te program may have been wonderfully executed and resulted in satisfying relationships and substantial professional gains for partici- pants. However, if the program manager does not collect and communicate infor- mation about these outcomes and how they fulfilled business case objectives to the appropriate executives, it may be as if the gains never happened. Interviews and surveys administered to participants are the most common methods for collect- ing end-of-cycle results. As mentioned above, if the program lead and sponsor can clearly articulate the program’s goals, then they should have an accurate idea of what they want to measure well before the first cycle ends.
CONCLUSION My purpose is to share observations and lessons learned in formal mentoring with leaders and program administrators. A
Army AL&T Magazine July-September 2015
final thought is that it is not practical to compare formal mentoring programs with informal, natural mentoring that occurs without special encouragement. Informal mentoring is ideal because it is built upon the mutual compatibility of the mentee-mentor pairs. Because they like each other, their relationship will almost always be satisfying.
Te problem is that these relationships are relatively uncommon—too rare, unfortunately, to be the basis for a human resources development program. So while we should encourage natural mentoring whenever it occurs,
formal mentoring
programs have a substantial and useful role in fostering professional development and worker engagement success.
For more information, go to the USAASC mentoring website at
http://asc.army. mil/web/policies-main/mentoring, which focuses on tools for program admin- istrators and mentee-mentor partnerships. Te website has links to high-quality pro- gram guides, a list of print resources and downloadable forms and templates to sup- port partnerships throughout their life cycle.
DR. STAN EMELANDER is a systems acquisition manager in Product Manager Individual Weapons, part of the Soldier Weapons project office in the Program Executive Office for Soldier. He holds a Ph.D. in organization and management from Capella University, an MBA and an M.S. in systems management from the Florida Institute of Technology and a B.S. in physics from the United States Military Academy at West Point. He holds a Project Management Professional certification, and is on the faculty of the Florida Institute of Technology. He is Level III certified in pro- gram management and Level I certified in systems engineering.
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