Business Mentoring Matters

Quick!! Off the top of your head, what do you think are 5 Things GREAT Mentors Do?.......

........Not so easy to come up with 5 that quickly is it? You may have come up with words like patience, understanding, time, commitment, flexibility.... The important thing to know is that there is no one hard-fast set of standards in mentoring. What works for one mentoring relationship may not work for another. 

Jay Steinfeld, Founder and CEO of Blinds.com recently wrote an article for Inc.com titled 5 Things Great Mentors Do. In the article, Steinfeld calls out 5 attributes he brings to his company and ways in which he strives to be a great mentor. Steinfeld has a great handle on mentoring his entire company, and on setting a standard for his employees to follow in his mentoring footsteps. Check out what Steinfeld says are the 5 Things Great Mentors Do:

1. Mentor the entire company.

I host weekly 15-minute sessions called "SayJay" where I, well, say things to our entire team of 130+ employees.  Things like updating people on company business, calling out top performers, asking for feedback on recent projects, and sharing ways that I, personally, work to help achieve our company values. They are fast, fun, and meant to keep the whole Blinds.com team informed about where the company is headed—and fully invested in that direction. They are a blast and infinitely valuable to our business.

2. Open door, open mind.

How many bosses claim to have an open-door policy? I have one, but I find it works best if I keep an "open-mind" policy, too. It took some time for me to realize that my employees often have better ideas than I do. But now that I do, I'm passionately committed to growing my team as leaders and idea generators. My open door is one of my favorite impromptu mentorship tools.

3. Set the tone for your managers.

I meet monthly with my direct reports to discuss their needs, concerns, and big projects in the queue. In advance of the meeting, they send me their agenda so I can think about how I can help. We then can dive into a one-on-one session about leadership, priorities, and anything in the big picture that one of us might be overlooking. Even better, they carry this idea forward to their own teams, too. This creates layers of mentors throughout the company that empower everyone to grow and share with one another in ways I could never anticipate.

4. Ask questions. Don't give answers.

When you're a mentor, it's tempting to wax philosophical and share old war stories of business days gone by.  But remember your goal: to prepare your mentee to tackle future challenges with his or her own brain. When discussing past challenges or trip-ups, ask open-ended questions, helping your mentee to make the connections that will solve future problems. Mentor yourself out of a mentorship, so your colleagues will grow and stand on their own.

5. Make mentorship part of your company's DNA.

One of our core values (maybe yours, too) is "Improve Continuously." It's not just a phrase on a business card: It's a constant activity that we consciously engage in. When you make personal growth everyone's job, leaders will emerge, connect with their teammates, assist new recruits and help your business grow. 

It is refreshing to see a CEO that believes so whole-heartedly in the importance of mentoring. Way to go, Jay Steinfeld!

We would love to hear what role mentoring has in your organization. Does your organization have a mentoring program in place? Does your CEO take the time to mentor employees? Is it done similarly to the way Steinfeld does it at Blinds.com? Or in another way? Feel free to leave comments below. 

For more information on business mentoring, download our FREE white paper: 5 Ways Mentoring Can Help Your Company.

Making a good match in mentoring is the most critical component to mentoring program success. A great mentoring program depends on it. You may have a smaller program or a smaller budget, but you shouldn't have to deprive program participants of some of the benefits that mentoring technology has to offer.

A great matching tool will provide the following benefits:

• Provide an objective approach to assessing a good match

• Use focus areas to pair mentoring expertise with mentoree needs for development

• Take into consideration personality preferences and traits to ensure compatibility

• Determine what roles mentors prefer in order to match a mentor's style to a mentoree's preferences

• Allow the Mentoring Program Manager to weigh certain components that are most important to them in matching

• Give the Mentoring Program Manager the ability to use filters to fine tune matches (for Auto-Matching or 3-Step Matching)

• Allow the Mentoring Program Manager the ability to edit matches based upon information gathered that would influence a good match

• Provide an efficient, time saving, quality matching process with a proven history of success

Management Mentors has been in the business of successfully matching mentors and mentorees for over 20 years, achieving, on average, a 90% success rate. This history of success led to our developing our precision matching component in MentoringComplete. Our tool asks these critical questions in 5 key sections and uses our proprietary algorithm to calculate what would make a good match.

We're proud to announce that we now can offer the most popular feature of MentoringComplete -- the precision matching tool -- as a stand-alone product.

Are you interested in seeing our Precision Matching Tool in action? Contact us and we'll set up a FREE demo!

Women are making strides in the workplace. But the progress is not as great as it could be. Many women still struggle to find mentors who have access to the organization’s power structure.

Women often face two difficulties in finding mentors:

• Successful and highly powerful women may resist mentoring another women for fear of creating a future competitor within the company.
• Since specific laws govern appropriate behavior in the workplace, men may be reluctant to initiate mentoring a woman for fear of negative repercussions.

Nevertheless, women need a professional mentoring experience, such as women mentoring networks, to give them access to the upper strata of business. Despite the challenges involved, your organization should offer women to women mentoring. Here are four very compelling reasons why:

1. There is a strong business case for workforce diversity and diversity initiatives, such as cross-cultural mentoring programs. Women are playing a stronger role in executive teams. Today’s workforce is evolving, and the best companies are responding to it by offering and fostering diversity initiatives to expand understanding and encourage collaboration across different demographics. That’s good news, but there’s still a big problem – most diversity initiatives don’t go far enough. And companies that offer insufficient programs are wasting time and money. Mentoring has proven to be a highly effective technique to reduce the barriers to equal opportunity. Management Mentors offers a unique program that helps companies establish mentoring in the context of their diversity initiatives.

2. A good mentor focuses on the mentoree’s total development – coaching the mentoree and teaching specific skills, but also sharing resources and network contacts, challenging the mentoree and creating a safe learning environment that encourages the mentoree to take risks and share vulnerabilities.

This exchange helps impact those intangibles that are so critical to personal success – self-confidence, communication skills, and realistic self-assessment. In a successful diverse mentoring relationship – a majority-minority match – these qualities can be developed to an even greater degree.

The right woman to woman mentoring relationship will benefit the mentor as much as the mentoree. It will be not only personally gratifying, but also will give the mentor a new perspective of the organization and its culture. In many cases, senior managers who have served as mentors have said that the relationship has re-energized them and even revitalized their career.

3. The true benefit and impact of mentoring is often seen not in achieving goals and objectives, but in the personal exchange between the mentor and mentoree. Successful mentoring creates real relationships and the opportunity for positive behavioral changes – an outcome that is especially beneficial for companies committed to promoting diversity.

4. Professional mentoring remains an important strategic tool for companies to attract and retain a diverse workforce and move that talent throughout the organization where it is needed. Women to women mentoring fosters that strategy while developing and retaining talent.

For more information on the importance of offering women to women mentoring, click here or contact us. Please also feel free to check out our many FREE white papers on mentoring including: 

10 Mentoring Tips for the Corporate Mentor

10 Mentoring Tips for the Coporate Mentoree

5 Ways Business Mentoring Fosters Career Advancement

Creating A Successful Mentoring Relationship

As we discussed in our last post, 4 Ways Employee Mentoring Will Help Your Business, an employee mentoring program will create loyalty to your organization by both mentors and mentorees, it will break down barriers and silo mentalities across departments by increasing knowledge share, and it can help your employees avoid making costly mistakes by allowing mentorees to tap into the expertise of others who have come before them.

But how can employee mentoring boost your company morale?

1. A mentor shows a personal interest in their mentoree and that interest can revitalize a mentoree/employee to develop or re-animate their career by having someone they can talk to and who will listen to them. By talking to someone who knows the organization, they may also come up with career paths they did not think of before. Those career paths keep them with your organization longer.

2. During periods of transition (which can be very traumatic to employee morale) having a mentor can help smooth the transition--reducing employee anxiety and assisting in changing the culture.

3. Due to the personal relationships developed in employee mentoring, mentors and mentorees will have a new-found vested interest in the company's success. This vested interest translates into happier employees. Happier employees translate into a boost in your company morale!

Please download our FREE white paper, 5 Ways Mentoring Can Help Your Company, for more information on employee mentoring.

Do you have any other ideas about how employee mentoring can boost company morale?

Many people believe that employee mentoring is a perk or a benefit offered to employees. In fact, mentoring not only helps the particpants involved with their career paths, but employee mentoring helps improve YOUR business.

4 ways employee mentoring will help your business:

1. Because of the personal relationship developed between a mentor and a mentoree, the mentor typically feels a greater loyalty to the organization. More importantly, both mentor and mentoree will have a vested interest in the company's success.

2. Using mentoring to cross-pollinate between departments increases the organization’s success by breaking down barriers and increasing knowledge share. Mentoring is a great way to break down the "silo mentality". 

Investopedia defines silo mentality this way: An attitude found in some organizations that occurs when several departments or groups do not want to share information or knowledge with other individuals in the same company. A silo mentality reduces efficiency and can be a contributing factor to a failing corporate culture.

A mentoring program will significantly decrease the chance of silo mentality to take place in your organization.

3. Mentoring provides knowledge sharing to occur between mentor and mentoree. The talent that exists in an organization is often under-utlizied. People in the organization can use that talent but don’t know how to access it because they don’t know how to get it. Mentoring is a great way of sharing knowledge, experience, and expertise. 

4. As a tool for development, mentoring allows a mentoree to tap into the expertise of others who have "been there, done that." Mentoring allows your employees to easily identify who has what skills and expertise so they can learn from one another. This may help to avoid costly mistakes that are made by people who are new to a department or to an organization.

Can you think of other ways that employee mentoring can help businesses?

Technology plays a huge role in every aspect of our lives these days. Much like our personal relationships, the decision to choose a specific technology when designing a mentoring program should be based on whether the technology will support or hinder the relationship. In this case, the mentoring relationship.

There are many different types of technologies businesses could employ when designing a mentoring program. The 4 most common technologies we see companies use are:

Video Conferencing: An online system for people to communicate using a technology such as video cameras connected to their PC's or laptops, or programs such as SKYPE, can be very useful for people who are in long distance relationships. People can see each other which enhances the relationship. This face to face interaction provides a much more meaningful relationship.

Online Mentoring System: An online mentoring system is valuable in terms of creating better mentoring matches (or mentoring pairs). Using an objective algorithm, an online mentoring system also allows program managers to monitor the relationships easily and with a minimum investment of time. 

E-learning: Using E-learning in mentoring (also known as eMentoring) is valuable because it allows participants to understand what mentoring is all about without the huge investment of cost to the company. For example, let's say your organization has decided to start a mentoring program. Does it make the most sense for your mentoring participants (employees) to be in the same place at the same time for the mentoring training? For some organizations, this does make sense. But for others, rather than flying folks into one location at the same time, an E-learning system allows for the training of all participants without the added travel expense.

Email: As crucial as it now seems in our every day lives, if a mentoring pair tries to develop a mentoring relationship solely using email, it will surely fail. Although email is a great way to share agendas and ask questions, a mentoring relationship through email is the least effective use of technology in a mentoring program.

We would love to hear the different ways you have used technology in your mentoring relationship. Please feel free to share in the comments section below ways in which your mentoring relationship has thrived (or suffered!) because of technology.

When designing a mentoring program for business, there are 3 things you should keep in mind: determine goals, define a strategy, and train your people.

1. Determine your organization's mentoring GOALS.

Is there a specific problem in the organization that the mentoring program should solve? Is the hope to retain talent? Develop talent? Promote a more diverse organization? Or all of the above? Identifying the problem before designing the program will assist in the design process and ensure that the ultimate goals are met.

2. Who in the organization will be responsible for holding program participants accountable (STRATEGY)?

Mentoring programs require a Mentoring Program Manager (MPM). The MPM is a critical player in a professional mentoring program. An effective mentoring program manager can often make the difference between failed mentoring relationships and successful ones; and in turn failed or successful mentoring programs.

The MPM is responsible for assisting the mentoring pairs in having an effective relationship and for supporting the pairs. Who in the organization has the time to do that? And who is qualified? This role is best handled by someone with authority and who is capable of resolving issues between pairs. Typically HR managers, Training and Development Managers, and Diversity Managers fill these roles.

3. Ensure that all participants in the mentoring program are TRAINED and understand what a mentoring relationship is all about.

Understanding the definition of mentoring is crucial. The training must be on mentoring-not coaching. Mentoring is "relational," while coaching is "functional." People often confuse coaching and mentoring. Though related, they are not the same. A mentor may coach, but a coach does not mentor. 

These 3 key steps are a great way to begin the design process of your mentoring program. For more detailed information on designing a mentoring program or if you have other questions about mentoring, please contact Management Mentors.

The following is a guest blog post written by Bonnie Cox of Power Training Institute. Bonnie reiterates some of the important messages we try to share with the Management Mentors' blog audience regarding mentoring relationships.

Is there really such a thing as a “self-made man (or woman)?”  Probably not. Ask any successful person what launched them in their career and they will tell you they had a mentor whogave them sound advice and guidance.

In my own career, I’ve been fortunate to have influential mentors at different stages. One though stands out above the rest. Bill was an engineer by education, but was quite well read in the areas of psychology, management, and human behavior. He and I were working on forecasting for a specific division of the company and he coached me through setting up Excel spreadsheets to run regression analyses. I really had no idea what I was doing; it was like drinking water from a high-pressure water hose, but having Bill coach me through the process taught me how to model proactive, forward-thinking action.

For those thinking, “Oh, I don’t need a mentor. I get along just fine at my job.” Be careful. That is a dangerous, self-sabotaging way to think. Everyone can use a mentor. Even successful CEOs can still benefit from having someone to give them input based on their experiences and expertise. 

Although sometimes a person may offer to mentor you and sometimes the perfect mentor comes along serendipitously, usually you will have to seek someone out, so choose them carefully. 

• Find someone that is respected by you and by others. If you don’t have respect for them you will not be inclined to take their advice and if they don’t have the respect of others, then they may not be someone you should take advice from.
• Look for a person that is not afraid to be straightforward with you. You want someone to hold you accountable to your goals and give you honest feedback, but in a non-confrontational way. Your mentor needs to be someone who can give you truthful answers to your questions while also asking the hard questions you may not want to answer.
• Choose a mentor in a different division than yours and who is more senior than you. Don’t let seniority intimidate you from seeking a mentor. Those who are higher up the food chain will be able to give you the most valuable advice about your goals and performance.

Finally, try finding a “reverse mentor.” Seek out a person who is younger than you so that you get a hipper, more youthful perspective. In my life, this person is a Generation Y’er who has a totally different perspective on life than I do and has helped me move into the 21^st century. This type of mentor can help you stay up to date on new trends, changing perceptions, and, perhaps most importantly, innovative technology. As much as some would like to dismiss certain technology as fads that will pass away, many of the changes that take place will change the face of your industry or business forever (just think about micro-blogging and the importance of Twitter!).

Mentorship is really a two-step process. First, find a mentor whose behavior you admire and respect. Then, go out and model their behavior.

Bonnie Cox, Founder of Power Training Institute, author of “52 Secrets to Being a C.O.R.E. Employee” and an HR professional, offers management and communications training solutions as a corporate facilitator and motivational speaker.

Executive Mentoring is different from other types of mentoring in that the mentor is always someone from the organization who holds an executive level position. With that position comes an awareness that Executive Mentors should have when relating with their mentorees. The following are 5 tips that all Executive Mentors should keep in mind when engaging as a mentor:

1. Be aware of the power you bring to the table. It doesn't matter how inviting you are or how comfortable you are able to make the mentoree--the power you have is always present in the room. Be aware of it.

2. Don’t overuse or underuse your power. An example of overusing power would be solving the mentoree’s issues for them. An example of underusing your power would be a mindset of "I won’t do anything because I don’t want to influence you." Neither one of these is good. The primary goal of mentoring is to help the mentoree develop--not to do it for them but to do it with them.

3. Be aware of cloning. Some Executive Mentors believe that their mentoree should follow them around and do exactly what he/she is doing to be successful. That’s not true. Your role as an Executive Mentor is to help the mentoree develop his/her career goals, not yours.

4. Do not feel responsible for mentoree’s success or failure. You are the facilitator of your mentoree's development. Avoid the trap of doing too much or too little. 

5. Be circumspect about sharing information about your mentoree to others. Be sure you define what confidentiality menas at the beginning of the relationship.

If you would like more information about Executive Mentoring, please feel free to download our free Executive Mentoring 101 e-book or contact us.

Have you heard the term Executive Mentoring? 

Executive Mentoring is mentoring that takes place with executives from the highest level of the organization who are involved as mentors.

Mentorees who are involved in an Executive Mentoring relationship have the opportunity to reap major benefits that they may not have in other types of mentoring relationships.

Some of these benefits may include:

• Executive Mentoring offers the possiblity of fast tracking a career;
• Executive Mentoring allows the mentoree to have a real global vision of the organization;
• Executive Mentoring may foster a greater depth of knowledge and understanding of the organization;
• If Executive Mentor moves to another company, he/she may want to take mentoree along.

The mentoree is not the only one who can profit from this mentoring relationship. Among the benefits that the Executive Mentor may experience are:

• Groom someone for future development;
• Get a perspective of the organization from the mentee’s level;
• Sense of doing good.

It is important to note that the power that Executives bring to the table can be intimidating to many mentorees, even more so than with a traditional mentoring relationship. Also, like all other mentoring relationships, there must be a clear understanding from the start of what the mentor does with the information he/she gains from the mentee.

***Important Rule Of Thumb: Executive mentors should not have influence over performance management/performance reviews of the mentoree.

As in all types of mentoring relationships, Executive Mentoring offers opportunities for mentorees to further develop and implement career goals. The skills of your company’s employees and executives are your most valuable assets. Executive mentoring programs provide a means of cultivating those skills throughout your organization. 

If you have any questions about Executive Mentoring or the other types of corporate mentoring programs we offer, please call us today.