Setting up mentoring relationships in organizations used to be a lot of work; HR had to find the time, or perhaps a specific ‘leadership development’ function. With many inexpensive or free off-the-shelf options to create social networks within an organization, there is no good reason to exclude any employee that wants a mentor, wants to mentor, or both.
With the addition of some supplementary materials to help create a good mentor-mentee relationship (yes, mentee is a real word, even if my computer’s dictionary doesn’t like it), this can foster great internal networking, personal growth and a boost in engagement. That said, these traditional mentor-mentee arrangements aren’t for everyone.
I recently discovered a few new flavours of mentorship, that I thought I would share:
In a great article called ‘Mentoring Millennials‘, Jeanne C. Meister and Karie Willyerd discuss several alternative approaches to the traditional mentor-mentee arrangement. Their summary is driven by the new organizational dynamics created by the large cohort of Millennials entering the workforce, and their propensity for being ‘attention sponges’ (hey, you grow up with video games and see what happens to your need for instant feedback!). For our purposes, I am presenting some of the methods they detail as alternatives to the traditional approach.
Reverse Mentoring
“This approach shifts the responsibility for organizing mentoring to line employees, who learn from senior executives by mentoring them.” I heard of a similar concept where parents would bring their kids to work to help teach them about the internet. I like this approach because it creates a win-win situation for all the parties involved. Mentor-mentee relationships always result in this win-win (IMHO) but often the more senior individual is challenged by the many activities that suck up their time. This way, the senior person can address some of the ‘below the line’ things that aren’t getting done (learning about a new technology, new process, whatever…) while the junior person gets to benefit from the feedback, and the relationship they create with someone further up the ladder.
Group Mentoring
“Using an online platform, one mentor can work with several mentees at a time—sometimes in different locations—on skills like generating sales leads or leading teams. The circles take advantage of platform features such as community forums, document-sharing spaces, group polling, and calendars that announce events and mentor availability.” This form of mentoring is actually enabled by the new social networking tools I mentioned a the start of this article. Because this form of mentoring can be topic-based, and get input from several potential mentors, it may be really well suited for people who are desiring mentorship of more of a technical nature, instead of the ‘soft skills’ mentorship often associated with the typical relationship.
The HBR.org article also discusses a couple of other methods that sound more like sales pitches for specific tools, so I’ll let their marketing departments share them with you. They include “Anonymous Mentoring” and “Mentoring with [Twitter-like] Micro-feedback“. In general, I found the article very valuable and worth a read (if a subscriber) or a paid reprint.
One more I wanted to add that wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the HBR.org article:
Peer Mentoring or ‘Coaching’
The traditional mentor-mentee relationship, or the ‘reverse mentoring’ approach mentioned above, suggest that there should be some kind of separation in the hierarchy between the mentor and the mentee; I have found this to be entirely unnecessary. Some of my best personal experiences as a mentor have come when mentoring (or coaching if you need another word) people who were pretty much a lateral when it came to the hierarchy and/or years of experience. Especially in large organizations, the variety of experiences that people in two different parts of the organization can have can be quite drastic, and much can be learned from sharing those different experiences. This can also be a great outlet for an individual who clearly wants to move into a management role, and may need a trial run –because of lack of opportunity or maturity– as a mentor before making that move.
Hopefully you have come away with some new ideas on how to look at mentorship!
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