The Secrets of Successful Mentoring Programmes

Professor Garvey: Mentoring gets used for a number of purposes within organisations and they include things like part of an induction process; it is often linked to things like leadership development, succession planning and talent management, career progression, support for other learning, diversity is where it gets used quite a lot, particularly in public sector organisations, to support diverse groups of people, redundancy support, often linked to change programmes where organisations put in one-to-one to support as part of facilitating and supporting people through change.

Female interviewer: What would you say are the key elements of a successful mentoring programme? What needs to be in place for it to work?

Professor Garvey: It needs to be absolutely clear who it is for and what it is for. Also it is important that the organisation understands what things that they have got already within the organisation that will support mentoring activity, so that might include managers being supportive of learning and development in general, for example, an environment where open discussion and debate is normal. But it is also important for mentoring programmes for people to know what is likely to get in the way, so what are going to be the problems.

There needs to be evaluation and I think there needs to be evaluation from day one because mentoring is a dynamic process and so understanding how the dynamics change and how people’s agendas change over time is a key part in informing the development of the programme that the organisation is running.

It needs to be voluntary.

There needs to be some ground rules which are reviewed regularly and there also needs to be a graceful exit, being clear at the start that people can exit from the mentoring arrangement by mutual agreement. What I usually recommend to people is that that is after three sessions.

The programme needs to have a light touch management, which means that there are not managers constantly poking around and checking up on people, but maybe the person that is managing the scheme will act as the person that facilitates the evaluation process and reports back and so on, and keeps in touch with people.

And there needs to be senior management participation. Senior managers participating preferably as mentees as well as mentors. There is a great temptation for senior managers to say, ‘Oh, I will be a mentor’, but actually it makes a much bigger statement if they say, ‘I have a mentor myself’.

Female interviewer: So for the people responsible for the mentoring programme, what are the best ways of getting it off the ground?

Professor Garvey: Well, I have a little mantra which is: start with the people who are interested; so seek out those that are up for it and are interested in the process. That’s the first thing.

There needs to be some kind of development for both mentors and mentees because a lot of people who volunteer to mentor will say things like, ‘Oh, I am doing it because I want to put something back’, and that might mean that they are wanting to give people the benefit of their experience, whether or not the person wants to hear about it. And that is potentially a problem. So training needs to look at how to reduce the desire to dish out advice and much more to facilitate the person’s learning and thinking about something.

There needs to be regular updates of progress in the scheme given out to those people that are participating, so around the organisation, and that could take various forms like newsletters or a little YouTube style publicity, little DVDs, getting testimony from those people that participate and having brown bag lunches, that kind of thing, so that people who are involved are kept informed about what is going on with it.

Female interviewer: How should an organisation go about promoting its mentoring programme to employees?

Professor Garvey: Start small and encourage people to participate and keep the information out there. So again, inviting mentors and mentees to share their experiences, that is important, through as many channels of communication that you can think of.

Link mentoring to any other learning and development or training programme that you have in the organisation so that people become aware that it is going on and it might be useful to them and offer mentoring to people if they are going through some kind of learning and development process.

So, having a communication plan is quite important so that you are not overwhelming, you are going at it in a fairly low key sort of way but it is often there and around in people’s consciousness.

Female interviewer: What are the best ways of matching mentors and mentees?

Professor Garvey: Some organisations really go to town and use things like development centres and psychometric tests to put people together, and some organisations go completely up the other end and make it completely voluntary free choice. Some organisations would have some kind of database where they would have what I would call a ‘pen picture’ of the mentors and the mentees would choose. There are some software products on the market which help with matching. It can be very tempting for people to match people together on the basis of similarity whereas matching for a degree of difference is usually much more productive. But, if the difference is too great you can end up with a distortion in the relationship and a kind of misunderstanding.

Cross-functional and interprofessional or interdepartmental matching is often much more successful than within the same structures, and what we have noticed is that the mentee can be quite fussy about who their mentor is and they are particularly interested in the mentor’s work-based experience. What we have found is very quickly that experience difference becomes irrelevant as they start to explore other issues which are important to them in terms of what they are trying to do or where they are trying to go.

So part of any training programme needs to emphasise this idea of how you go about thinking about who your mentor might be and it is not necessarily go for the most obvious work-based experience, maybe go for something else, you know, has the person got a good record of developing other people, are they interested in that, are they viewed as somebody who is approachable and a good listener?

Female interviewer: What training should mentors and mentees receive and how should this be delivered within an organisation?

Professor Garvey: Some people believe that because they are senior, they have the skills already, and people who organise schemes need to be aware that they may have a tussle on their hands with senior people who say, ‘I don’t need to do a course because I know all about this already.’ And of course they may know about it already, depending on their experience and background, so the scheme coordinator needs to be prepared to question and discuss things with potential mentors.

But the sorts of things that need to find their way into training programmes should be addressing the question of what is mentoring, and what is mentoring within this particular context and related to the purpose of this scheme. There also needs to be some skills practice and I found that it is important that both mentors and mentees have an opportunity to practise skills.

People need to understand about the scheme, its purpose; they need to have a process model to work with and they also need to be aware of some of the organisational issues or raise some of the organisational issues that are around about mentoring, because you can’t assume that everybody is for it.

Another central element of training is to impress on people that listening is key and it is not about advice giving and it is not necessarily either about asking clever questions. There is a lot of value in listening to what people have to say and any mentoring workshop needs to be delivered in what I call the mentoring way, which is using the participants to provide a lot of the content and whoever facilitates it needs to be thinking along the lines of don’t answer questions that people haven’t asked, work with what people are thinking about and what they are asking about the mentoring process and give them plenty of opportunity to think it through and to practise the skills on each other.

Female interviewer: And what types of ongoing support should mentors receive throughout the course of a mentoring programme?

Professor Garvey: I think a good way is to have some kind of group support so that mentors have an opportunity to come together from time to time through perhaps a learning set process so that they can discuss issues about mentoring without breaking confidentiality of course, but talking about some of the skills and processes used.

I think an organisation needs to have a mentoring library, access to reading material if people want it and also access to films or videos that might be around on the subject so that people can do their own development as well, and people need to be aware that this stuff exists. There was an organisation that I was working with that used to regularly send out articles to people on the subject and just say, ‘You know, if you fancy reading this, here’s one’, which was quite useful.

Evaluation is a form of support, so getting people together to consider what is coming back from the evaluations so that they feel as if they are taking part in the scheme design and its operation. And sometimes I find that people that have been engaged in mentoring for a while might want to start thinking about more advanced skills in mentoring; they might start to get into it and find it quite useful and say, ‘Well, what else is there to learn?’ and ‘I came across this situation and how might I deal with it’, and networking events, that kind of thing. And anybody who is coordinating or managing the programme needs to keep in touch with people fairly regularly on a light touch approach so that relationships are maintained.

Female interviewer: What involvement, if any, should a mentee’s line manager have in the mentoring process?

Professor Garvey: They should know it is going on and, in my view, only take part by invitation of the mentee. What shouldn’t happen is that the mentor and the line manager end up with private discussions about the mentee between themselves or the mentor gets asked for an opinion on a mentee that has applied for promotion or something because it brings in an element of judgement and assessment and power and control. And I think if a three-way discussion is appropriate, then that should also be by agreement with the mentee and a lot depends on people’s relationships, but generally, the minimum is the line manager should know it is going on, but actually beyond that they can only participate by invitation.

Female interviewer: Would it be appropriate for say, on a one-to-one meeting, if a manager knew that one of their employees was being mentored, would it be appropriate in a one-to-one meeting to, sort of, ask how it is going or ask what the outcomes have been?

Professor Garvey: Absolutely. If the mentee is sitting with their line manager and the line manager says, ‘How is it all going with the mentoring?’, I don’t see there is a problem in that being discussed. It is where the mentor might get involved without the mentee’s knowledge, that’s a potential problem or it’s about the line manager going to the mentor and saying, ‘Look, I have got a bit of a problem with my team member and I know you are mentoring them, I wonder if you could tackle that with them?’ That’s just not on. Because the mentor’s interests are different to the line manager’s, or should be. The line manager is primarily interested in the performance of their team member whereas the mentor is primarily interested in the mentee’s development over a period of time. And of course, that could coincide but actually it is not quite the same.

Female interviewer: How should a mentoring programme be evaluated?

Professor Garvey: I think that evaluation is a very important part of the process and it needs to be ongoing so that it is done on a fairly regular light touch basis and that can take different forms. It can be through techniques such as focus group discussions or one-to-one interview processes, or questionnaires is an easily administered approach to doing it.

What is important is to look at what I call the narrative of change, which is where did you start, what were the expectations and what has changed over time and what can we draw from that, because that helps to inform the design and make changes to it and people need to be aware of the responses to the learning that has come from evaluations and make changes as appropriate. I think evaluation processes have, kind of, got a little more sophisticated than they used to be. They used to be quite simple and straightforward and deal with what I would call a kind of happiness scale and sometimes they went further and looked at things like return on investment and that kind of stuff, but I think actually mapping the shifts gives a better insight into what is going on with the dynamics and what changes are happening within the organisational context than the simpler approaches.

Female interviewer: And finally, what advice would you have for HR or L&D professionals who are looking to get mentoring onto the agenda in their organisations?

Professor Garvey: You don’t have to spend a fortune and it is important to be arguing the case with the decision-makers in the organisation by focusing on the benefits and also by focusing on what you see as the purpose, and promoting the idea that it builds capacity, builds capability and contributes to an ongoing changing agenda within the organisation. Quite often I supply people who are interested in getting mentoring going with some information so that they can put their case to senior people to do with, you know, what it does and its benefits and data and that sort of thing and I think that is quite important to put forward a good reasoned case.

Female interviewer: Thank you for listening to our interview on mentoring programmes with Professor Bob Garvey.