Organizations make mentoring part of the business goal to get better results
Organizations use mentoring to achieve increased employee morale and higher organizational productivity. The benefits organizations accrue through mentoring directly and indirectly are numerous.
Capacity building is the key reason why many organizations are actively planning a mentoring program throughout the year. Be it achieving a quality benchmark standard or implementing a change management program, often individuals and teams need to possess the right knowledge and skills to make the transitions quicker. A well planned mentoring program helps individuals and teams to align to the common goals.
Mentoring creates value by setting a common standard for transfer of knowledge between the mentor and mentee. Through a structured approach involving interaction between team members, one-to-one meetings, sessions where experiences are shared, mentoring aims to build a team’s competency thus enhancing its ability to work smarter and faster. Mentoring helps a team model a business situation and establish standard responses to situations thus making a team more effective.
A well planned mentoring program ensures that an organizational business goals are linked to the program. Business outcomes can be enhanced and predicted better with a mentoring program which sets up models, monitoring systems and standards for organizational response. In any such program, the mentoring takes place at multiple levels to cover every aspect of a team’s operations. Individuals gain immensely through this shared learning while on the job and will be able to work better as a team.
Mentoring in many Japanese and German organizations is a tool built right into their corporate DNA. The TPS (Toyota Production System) for instance is famed for its mentoring approach where the chief engineer helps the entire system to achieve its engineering, production and quality goals. In the US, mentoring is part of the Federal Workforce Flexibility Act (2004) which requires managers to be trained to mentor employees.
Mentoring is an informal relationship between the protégé or a group of protégé and a senior or a team of seniors who are not directly overseeing the protégé. It is not a feel good initiative undertaken by the HR department. In many successful organizations, it is part of the organizational goals to have mentoring programs run alongside business goals to ensure enhanced business outcomes.
