The Benefits of Mentoring – GTWN Reports (2)
by Marta T. White, Vice President of A T Kearney, London

In the first part of her essay on mentoring, Marta T. White summarized the key roles of mentoring, gave a literature survey of the definitions distinguishing between specific and general uses of mentoring. The second part of her article deals with the advantages and disadvantages of mentoring.

Advantages of mentoring

The advantages of mentoring to the protégé include improved self-confidence; learning to cope with the formal and informal structure of the company; career advice and advancement.

Maureen Scholefield (1990) in notes on a mentoring workshop for women, lists the advantages for the protégé of mentoring as follows:

• individual support
• guided advancement
• confidential relationship
• access to information
• sounding board
• practical assistance
• friendship.

The benefits for the mentor can include:

• personal involvement
• motivation
• job satisfaction up-todate knowledge
• efficiency
• career advancement.

Mentoring allows protégés to develop new ideas and experiment with concepts and approaches within a relatively ‘safe’ environment and at the same time can allow mentors to learn about new approaches and techniques from recently-qualified protégés who may be more up-to-date and academically better informed about recent developments and theories than they are themselves.

Previous research findings confirmed that informal mentoring systems can be effective for developing young managers, and that senior executives and managers should be encouraged to act as mentors to high performers. It is important, however, to point out that mentors may need to be taught how to mentor. Mentoring tends to reinforce hierarchical networks, it is therefore worth first examining informal networks and then deciding whether mentoring was the best form of enhancing one’s career or simply strengthening a peer group.

Mentoring can also be used alongside other methods of development, such as networks, social events, internal groups and professional associations; peers can act as mentors as well as more senior colleagues.

Disadvantages of mentoring

There is of course a negative side of mentoring, when mentoring relationships turn out badly for participants, due to faulty assessments of mentor’s or protégé’s needs, goals or intentions, or because of difficulties between members of the relationship. The main factors that can adversely affect mentor relationships are:

• failure to communicate needs
• failure to communicate goals
• protégé’s failure to correctly assess mentor’s intentions
• emotional overdependence
• both parties’ failure to assess political environment
• mentor’s inability to control political environment
• protégé’s failure to establish other alliances.

While some of these problems may arise in any mentoring relationship, many of the disadvantages of mentoring described above are more applicable to workplace mentoring rather than mentoring relationships that take place outside the work situation. Here it is more likely that the disadvantages of mentoring will relate more to practical difficulties, such as when and where to meet, how often, and problems of sustaining a mentoring relationship at a distance. Some of the pitfalls of mentoring can be:

• lack of commitment or preparation for mentoring
• unsuitable or poorly-briefed mentors
• abuses of confidentiality and misuse of mentoring for personal or business ends
• badly-managed mentoring relationships leading to overdependence or too deep a personal involvement.

A successful mentoring relationship requires honesty, mutual respect, time, commitment, a sense of humour, regular meetings, good communication and effective feedback.

Mentoring can overcome some negative features of minority groups. One area of underrepresentation is that of women in managerial positions.

Mentoring for women

Quite a lot has been written about the ways that mentoring can help women’s career prospects. Women are a group for whom mentoring can be particularly beneficial. Mentoring has three clear advantages for women, in that it can legitimise access to key people, increase their visibility within organisations, and bestow legitimacy. However, there may be difficulties in cross-gender mentoring, such as rumour, innuendo and gossip about the nature of the relationship, jealousies between partners.

In order to resolve such difficulties, the mentoring relationship must be characterised from the start by a high level of openness and communication, with great clarity about the expectations and commitments of the parties.

In reviewing the literature on mentoring, we find that the mentoring process is possibly more critical for women than for men. There is strong evidence that successful professional women had mentors who had sigirificantlv influenced their careers.

Successful application

Mentoring has benefits which extend beyond the programme. Mentoring is a valuable development experience for the mentor and the protégé and should be recognised as part of the participants’ personal development plan.

Based on the general rule that not everyone is suited to be a mentor, a filtering and selecting process should take place. Mentoring is and should be a voluntary initiative, but it should also be quality oriented. It is recommended that a selection panel be appointed to decide, from those who put their names forward, who would be better suited to join the programme. The selection is based on a questionnaire which highlights their desire, commitment, suitability and interests and skills to be shared.

It is important that mentors fully understand their role in the relationship and are particularly suited and skilled in all those areas. Mentors are responsible for managing the mentoring relationship and should be trained to do so. A successful mentoritig programmme should entail a session on what is expected from mentors and protege’s.

Quality control

Mentors and protégés should obtain a manual framework for the programme. Each participant is able to refresh their memories and their experience of the basic training and will be able to measure their own skills development. Each participant have the opportunity to have embodied a personal record of their individual journey, a record of skills they have developed, collect evidence and measure success.

General caveats that should also be borne in mind are:

• the need for quality control
• ethical considerations and the need for a protected confidential mentoring relationship to be preserved
• the voluntary nature of the mentoring relationship.

The mentoring model may be appropriate for different kinds of people in different circumstances, while for others it may not be helpful. The perceived value of a mentoring is likely to be affected by the quality of existing management training and development in an organisation, and/or by the quality of a person’s relationship with their line manager. This does not mean that if both of these are good mentoring is unnecessary; mentoring is likely to fulfil a different role for each individual.

On the other hand, the demand for mentoring may be greater if the quality of the management training is less than adequate, or if the scope for individual development within an organisation is limited.

Mentoring can play a crucial role in ‘out-of-companies’ networks. Mentoring helps junior professionals receive guidance and support from senior professionals allowing them the opportunity of exploring, planning and brainstorming ideas in a safe environment. There is evidence of successful professional mentoring schemes which are run out-of-companies. All one needs to have is a common theme.