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by Barry Sweeny, 2003
What's the Difference Between a Quality Program and an Effective Program?
You may be surprised to know that there are some critical distinctions. They are critical because they are fundamental to the way you improve your program and practices.
1. QUALITY is a condition that must exist relative to something else:
Given this definition, the effort to become a higher QUALITY mentoring program will require some mentoring program standards. The effort to promote QUALITY mentoring requires standards of mentoring as a professional practice. I have recently been giving this considerable attention, but it is an evolving picture. Never-the-less, a quality program is one that "has arrived", not one that is "in process".
2. EFFECTIVENESS is a condition that also must exist relative to something else. In this case, the something else is a set of goals. In other words, a program is deemed "effective" if:
It is getting closer to it's goals, or...
It is successful in accomplishing it's goals (that is, it does what it was designed to do). This is helpful from the perspective of continually improving a program, sustaining the resources that support it, and accomplishing important and valued things. However, these distinctions are not as simple as it might seem.
FOR EXAMPLE: A program that has as its sole purpose to "orient new employees to their job", may assign a mentor to help accomplish that purpose. If, later on, all new employees feel "well oriented", then it could then be said that this is an effective mentoring program . In other words, the program has accomplished what it intended to do, regardless of whether it meets some standard for quality or not.
However, placed against a set of program standards, or compared to another program with additional purposes (such as the improvement of productivity and result), the orientation program seems of less quality and to be less effective than those which accomplish more. This suggests that there is a consensus that such peer support programs as mentoring and coaching should at least address improving productivity and results.
You may not agree. However, that is my position and that is what I am specifically known for helping others to accomplish.
THE RANGE OF POSSIBILITIES -Mentoring is an age old method of supporting development which we find in business, education, and all areas of life, with adults and with youth. In most of the comments provided here, the context is a career or job focused one, suggesting that mentoring is for adults in professional settings. The reader should appreciate that ALL of the advice given here directly translates to mentoring of YOUTH as well, though the specific language used may need adjustment for that setting. With that understanding, mentoring can occur any time during a career, but especially when someone seeks to learn from someone else who has experience in the topic for learning.
This conception of career-long learning means that people in pre-employment education and training, new employees in orientation and training (what I call induction), experienced employees, middle managers, and executives should all have mentors.
That
list suggests that the goal is for everyone to be learning and working with a mentor.
That is exactly what we are trying to define when we use the term "learning
organization". The fast-paced, competitive, and global nature of information
flow, changes in business and other professional transactions, and new models for
decision making all require that we all be actively and continually learning. Such
continual learning is not the norm and so, it requires a high level of support to
attain and sustain.
That is why we all need to BE mentored.
WHO WOULD BE THE MENTORS FOR ALL THOSE PEOPLE? - Just as we all need to be mentored so we are continually learning, we all also need to BE a mentor. That is necessary because of the high level of support needed to sustain continual, organization-wide learning and growth. It is also needed because the very best way for you to be a learner is for you to be a teacher too! That's right. Any one who has ever had to teach someone else knows THAT is when you really have to know and be able to do that very thing well yourself. We learn a ton by having to teach it to others. That is the second reason why everyone should also BE A mentor.
In other words, as the visual above shows, we all need to BE MENTORED and BE MENTORS, if we are in a learning, continually improving organization which expects individual, continual performance improvement. (How else would the organization improve?)
A DEFINITION - Mentoring is three things all at the same time:
How is coaching different from mentoring? Do we need both?
Coaching is the support for learning job-related skills which is provided by a colleague who uses observation, data collection and descriptive, non-judgmental reporting on specific requested behaviors and technical skills. The coach also must use open-ended questions to help the other employee more objectively sees their own patterns of behavior and to prompt reflection, goal-setting, planning and action to increase the desired results.
Mentoring is the all-inclusive description of everything done to support protege orientation and professional development. It includes creating the relationship, emotional safety, and the cultural norms needed for risk taking for the sake of learning, and the desired rresult of accelerated professional growth.
Coaching is ONE of the strategies which mentors must learn and effectively use to increase their proteges' job skills. Therefore, we need both to maximize employee learning. Read the next item below for more on this.
How is coaching & mentoring different from supervision?
Supervision is the process of employee development, management, and evaluation which is used by a boss. People can grow as a result of supervision, at least to the point that the possibility of losing one's job is a motivation for growth. Learning in a supervisory situation is often a very high risk circumstance. If an employee shares his weaknesses, or her needs with a supervisor, they risk poor evaluations and dismissal. That is why supervision is often not very effective. The risk taking needed for learning and growth are not likely to occur.
Very progressive managers who are also
effective leaders can be somewhat more successful in prompting professional growth
in their employees, but leadership requires "followership". Leadership
implies an "attracting" or "pulling" influence, and followership
suggests that employees are drawn toward something, but have some degree of choice
as to whether they follow the leader and whether they grow or not. Anyone who has
tried to lead others knows just how true that is. Marilyn Ferguson states it so well.
"The gate to change is locked on the inside."
"High Impact Mentoring and Coaching" is designed to be very separate from supervision. This approach to mentoring and coaching frames the mentor/coach as a highly effective leader WORTH following. In other words, "High Impact" mentors and coaches are MODELS and MAGNETS of best practices, increased performance, and greater results. People are attracted to them.
Also, this conception includes explicitly understanding that the employee who works with a mentor or a coach must choose:
Choosing to act that way takes a very special circumstance and relationship, and that is why mentoring and coaching must NOT overlap evaluation and supervision.
Certainly supervisors MUST be trained and expected to also act as mentors and coaches. Those skills will improve their ability as supervisors and the results of their supervision. However, we ALSO need non-supervisory relationships between mentors/coaches and the employees who are their proteges, if we expect to dramatically accelerate the learning and performance within our organizations.
To what extent can mentoring and coaching really improve employee performance?
Supervision is often a fairly negative approach because it is about evaluation and what an employee is NOT doing. It is necessary, but often not the most effective way of promoting employee development and performance improvement. There is significant research* that suggests that when a supervisor states an expectation for a change in behavior:
That indicates that in YOUR organization, there could be as little as 25% impact as a result of supervision. Not a very effective result. Certainly, these data may be better in some types of organizations and under different, more progressive styles of management and leadership.
Never-the-less, contrast the previous data with a study done by the ASTD** which found that training alone increased manager productivity by 24%. However, when combined with coaching and mentoring support strategies, the study found that productivity was increased by 88%!! That is a significant triple difference!
Clearly, a combination of coaching and mentoring as a follow up support system to training is the most powerful strategy for employee performance improvement! That just makes good sense because training provides the knowledge and initial skills development, and mentoring and coaching provide the on-going support & structures for development of skill mastery and implementation of better practices in the employee's daily work. That's why neither training nor mentoring BY THEMSELVES are enough to ensure the protege's performance is what is needed.
* Carl Glickman
** American Society for Training and Development
What is "Induction" and why is it needed in business and other non-educational settings?
Basically, induction is the process of joining a profession, learning the specialized knowledge and skills expected of members of that profession, and being accepted as a professional by one's peers.
In some settings, that often means nothing more than signing a contract and then "poof", you are a "professional" employee. However, many feel that this narrow conception lacks some of the richness and complexity that we assign to our professions. If a professional is more than someone whose living is earned by doing a paying job, then induction to a profession must be more than signing up for the career.
Induction can be a longer process requiring up to several years, which is needed to reach some level of competence, worthy of being called a "professional". In other words, when that level of competence is achieved and you are a "professional", your induction process is completed. The trick here is determining what level of competence is enough to be called a "professional". When employee skill certification is involved in the profession, the most reasonable way to determine when a novice employee becomes a professional is when (s)he attains professional certification. That level of certification is earned because they have demonstrated a level of competence based on some set of standards.
Often our standards for professional conduct are not that well defined. That's where an effective induction program can really help. Not only does induction define the transitions and provide the help and guidance to ensure a smooth transition, but effective induction actually accelerates the rate of learning during the transition and affirms and supports the effort needed to make the transition.
Mentors, coaches, managers and supervisors can all help the induction process along. However, as defined earlier, the roles of supervisor and mentor must be played out differently to maximize the employees growth and performance. (Click here to see this in a chart.)
What should be the most basic goals of a quality induction program?
Quality induction programs might address many kinds of goals (see below), but there are three fundamental goals I recommend:
1. Orientation to the work setting, job expectations and responsibilities, the organization, key people, organizational culture and philosophies, and the specific tasks, and expectations of the job assignment.
2. Induction to the profession, including making a commitment to the organization and the job, and the development of skills necessary to function at least at the performance level of the current typical employees. (Is that good enough?)
3. Induction into the shared vision for the profession and organization. - Every profession and organization has a vision of what it is trying to become that exceeds what it currently is capable of doing. New employees need to enlist in the journey of continual improvement, the development of the skills which are needed to become the desired employee and team member of the future, and the development of the work environment, culture, and organization which are sought for the future. In other words, an excellent mentoring program must answer the question, "how shall we induct a new person into this organization and profession when we are just in the middle of redefining ourselves and what constitutes excellence?"
It is only when induction and mentoring address all three of these purposes that a mentoring program can be expected to increase an organization and employees' performance.
Now, those three essential goals are often implemented through a set of more focused and specific objectives such as the following list. Such specifics are critical to success because they clearly spell out what's expected, what success will look like. That clarity is needed to plan short and long-term actions, monitor progress, and celebrate success in the end. Caution however, is in order. The following list does not suggest that all of these things should be undertaken by every mentoring program. Pick those which are appropriate to the organizational and individual needs your program is designed to address.
Common options for mentoring & induction program goals are:
What are the essential components of a quality induction program?
Since induction programs can have a range of goals, the components needed to attain those different goals will vary considerably. However, for a program intent on BOTH helping new employees into the profession AND promoting improved performance, productivity and results, there is a TWO LEVEL SYSTEM of strategies that are needed. Mentoring alone is NOT ENOUGH, you MUST use an INDUCTION approach!
Why don't all excellent employees also make excellent mentors?
This is a very real and pervasive phenomena in mentoring today. The answer to this question is probably your biggest opportunity to make your mentoring program a highly valued component of your organization's success.
When I was originally trained as a new staff developer (1985) One of the training components was a review of the "Principles of Adult Learning". In fact, this topic is still an essential aspect of staff development and mentoring today. It is very interesting to me, however, that a comparison of "adult learning" principles and "leadership" principles (another hot topic today) shows that they are really one and the same principles.
Let's consider an example. Adult learning theory states that we need to respect the experience and prior knowledge of adult learners and build on that strength in designing staff development for them. Seems logical, right? We need to do that for adult learners, because that how adults learn best. Amazing! The principles of effective leadership suggest that effective leaders do the same thing! They understand that strong leadership requires followership and that such a following is earned, in part by respecting the prior experience of employees.
That is why I assert that if a mentor is effective in working with another adult learner, they are so because they have applied the principles of effective leadership to that process, whether they label it or think of it that way or not.
What's happening here ?! This issue is surfacing everywhere because we are in the midst of redefining what excellence in work and in leadership are. Just as we are redefining roles from just "management" to also include leadership, we need to redefine the kinds of role models our mentors are expected to be. That is why not all "good" employees (by an older definition) make good mentors (by a newer definition). That is also why the opposite IS true. Great mentors are also automatically great employees and leaders. In fact, when I examine truly effective mentoring, I find that it is the same thing as effective leadership as we are coming to know it. This is quite important, as it clearly indicates that learning to be an effective mentor is exactly the practice we need for learning how to become better employees and leaders.
My experience shows this concept to be the hidden potential of effective mentoring and one which very few mentors or mentor leaders understand. Resolving this issue has been a big focus of mine since 1992 and it is what I mean when I use the term "high impact" mentoring. It is teaching mentors HOW to mentor so it promotes performance growth in others.
Why do mentors in some programs seem incapable of providing effective mentoring?
It is true that many mentors do not provide the quality of relationship or guidance we might wish to see provided. When that happens, we do not see evidence of improved protege performance that we want. It is also true, in a small fraction of mentoring cases, that the mentor should probably not have been selected as a mentor.
Program leaders often must work to improve mentoring but they sometimes have the cause of the problem and the problem mixed up. In other words, you must be sure to get the "cart and the horse" in the right order so you are focused on something that will improve mentoring practices.
I place the success of mentoring squarely at the "feet" of the mentoring programs in which the mentors work. Being an employee and being excellent on the job does not sufficiently prepare one to be a mentor. Nor can we assume that life prepares one to be an effective mentor. Even though there are some of us who might agree that we were mentored, (by some definition of that word), how would we know how to be an effective mentor if we never had a model of such effectiveness to observe ourselves? This is why I strongly urge mentoring programs to provide:
The mentoring program needs to improve if it does not clearly define mentor roles and tasks, the mentoring relationship, the mentoring process, and if it does not adequately prepare, support, AND provide excellent models for the mentors to help them accomplish what we ask of them.
What evaluation questions should an existing mentor program be asking itself?
Here are some questions that I frequently find I must ask when people wonder about what they are accomplishing in mentoring. Perhaps these questions will help you to "turn over" the issues involved in induction and mentoring program improvement so you can see them and your own program from a new perspective.
The critical questions to ask are:
Almost always, mentoring programs do not have sufficient data to answer these questions with any certainty. Often we respond that we are too busy working and trying to do mentoring to evaluate what we are doing. Yet, these do seem to be very critical questions that mentoring programs would want to be able to answer, and even to address! Take the time at some point to ask and answer these questions yourself. Better yet, use the IMA listing of consultants to access the expert help you need to design an effective program evaluation process and instruments, and give you the data you need to answer these questions.
When I hear this question, I wonder,
When I ask others questions such as, "How do you know if your program is OK?" the response is usually, "We get very few complaints", or "Everyone seems to think things are fine". My response to these statements may seem to be a bit out of "left field", but I often find it to be very appropriate. I respond, "Shouldn't there be some complaints?"
If there are few concerns and few issues surfacing, then there is good reason to believe that mentoring is only accomplishing a tiny part of its potential. In addition to reducing the stress for novice employees, orientation to a job, etc. mentoring is also one of the best tools there is to promote the creation of better norms of collegiality and collaboration, to press for finding more time for job-embedded staff development, increasing openness to professional feed back, learning the power of seeing oneself through another person's eyes, and creating a relentless focus on improving productivity and results.
If there are no complaints, there are probably few of these things occurring, little challenge to the status quo, little growth, and little professional stretching of roles, relationships, the work culture, etc. If there are few complaints, almost always that is good reason to be concerned about the effectiveness of the mentor program.
If there are reasons to be concerned about the program's effectiveness, then there are also good reasons to be concerned about your ability to sustain the program in the future. Mentoring is invisible to everyone outside the mentoring relationship. That suggests that there are many decision makers in an organization who may have little or no reason to value mentoring, and THAT suggests that these decision makers will someday call into question the value of the program. Think about it. What complaints SHOULD you expect to hear given your program's goals? What strategic initiatives should your program be supporting?
What are the Financial Benefits of Mentoring? - The Cost of Employee Attrition:
The benefits of mentoring can be shown as financial and non-financial costs. This answer is focused on the former. See below for information on the latter.
There are a number of ways to illustrate that there are many hidden costs already in the budget which are the current costs of NOT providing effective mentoring support to new or middle level employees. In fact, I always find that the cost of employee attrition is MORE than the cost of an effective induction and mentoring program because it can save the organization money which was an existing and hidden cost. When you show this "Return on Investment" (ROI) the program will be perceived as more "cost effective" and "worth it" than the approach of not supporting employees.
Here are three clear examples of how mentoring for employee retention PAYS, and pays BIG TIME.
1. Sandia National Laboratories has concluded that they lose about $200,000 every time a new engineer leaves their lab. Obviously, they have established a mentoring program to ensure they have done all they can to minimize losses like that!
2. The "Emerging Work Force Study" reported in Business Week (3/1/99) stated that 35% of employees who did not receive regular mentoring plan to look for other jobs within the next 12 months. Compare that to those who did have regular mentoring. In that case 1/2 of that number, or only 16% expected to change jobs. Are YOU interested in cutting your cost of employee attrition by half?
3. The American Society for Training and Development conducted a study which found that training alone increased manager productivity by 24%. However, when combined with coaching and mentoring strategies, implementation of training and productivity were increased by 88%!! Do YOU get those kinds of results from your training program?
Some other things to consider that demonstrate clear financial costs are:
What is the cost to the organization when an employee leaves the organization or is not rehired? What you need to identify are your organization's costs for:
Collect this data and figure it out as a cost for each individual employee. Then compare that to the cost of induction per employee. In many organizations, you will be thousands of dollars ahead by doing the right thing. Also, keep in mind that the money you will save is money you already spend. It is not new money you need to find to support mentoring.
The Non-Financial Benefits in Attracting Quality New Employees -
A very common interview question now days is "Will I be assigned a mentor?" Your organization's ability to answer that question affirmatively, AND to describe the quality of support you provide, is a critical lever for attracting and hiring the best employees available. Even when you may not have the best salary to offer, you can compete for the best when you treat professionals like a professional. The power of mentoring and induction programs to improve the ability of an organization to attract the best new employees and to dramatically increase retention of existing employees is very well documented.
Increased attraction is critical because:
What are the Non-Financial Costs of Employee Attrition?
Decision makers seem most interested in the financial costs related to providing mentoring and induction. However, there are also some very significant "costs" of NOT using mentoring. Mentoring delivers a big impact on the quality of employees and the results they achieve but these "cost savings" are more difficult to demonstrate directly. Never-the-less, these indirect costs need to be clearly presented. Here are some ideas about calculating and demonstrating those often more hidden costs.
This has been a tricky issue because many organizations worry that if they build up the capacity of employees, the employees may leave and take that investment with them. When that occurs, organizations wait until an employee demonstrates a commitment to the organization, and THEN begin to invest in the person. That is a critical financial and strategic error. What we have been learning about the factors that cause employee attrition and retention refutes that old argument. Refer to the answers to the question about employee retention (above) for more on this.
Helping employees to set career goals is not simple, but it is WELL worth it. Here's where to start.
1. Helping others set and attain career goals is essentially a process of skill building and attitude adjustment. Your purpose is primarily to give folks a sense of self-efficacy, that they can influence, to an increasing extent, what happens to them during their lives.
2. Define what your organization is willing to do to help folks attain their career goals. Frame it within an understanding of what retains quality employees.3.Define what the organization cannot do.
4. Establish a mentoring program so that all the following "help" occurs within a long-term, collaborative program. For most people collaboration is practically a requirement for reflection and self-assessment. Without collaboration, the will and time for reflection is overwhelmed by the daily work.
5. Help the employees to define what their ideal career looks like (set a standard for comparison)
6. Help them to create, show them where to find, or provide them with self-assessment tools which compare where they perceive themselves to be relative to where they WANT to be.
7. Help them learn how to set reasonable goals and intermediate objectives to move their skills and knowledge from where they are toward where they want to be.
8. Help them learn how to define action plans that will be reasonable, yet challenging, and that will give them gradual progress toward their goals.9. Help them identify the resources, knowledge, time, and skills they will need to attain their objectives and ultimate goals.
10. Help them learn how to measure and monitor implementation of their intentions and plans, and then, to celebrate progress when they achieve an intermediate objective. This is the major reason I advocate for career/professional development portfolios.
11. Finally, help them learn how to help others through this same process by becoming a mentor. Do this all along throughout the entire process by periodically having the mentor ask them to answer three questions:
- What have you just learned? (Of course, ask this after a mentoring discussion unless it was answered during the discussion.)
- What did I do as your mentor that helped you to learn that? (You'd like feed back about the effectiveness of your mentoring, right?)
- Is there any way you can use that knowledge to improve your effectiveness? For example, if a protege sees that their own performance is increased as a result of mentoring, perhaps THEY need to become more of a mentor to those with whom they work? (Sometimes the answer to #3 is not clear. It depends on what was learned.)
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