Donovan does mentoring work with the ASX 100-200 companies. He has been getting a lot more work in the past three years. Indeed, the global financial crisis gave it a boost.
“While budgets fell through the floor, people said ‘Shit, we have a chance here that we might lose our very best talent and we can’t afford that to happen. How do we use the historic knowledge of the corporation to produce new people?’
“The overall volume may be not as good as it was before the GFC but the quality is different. I have moved from an hour, to an hour and a half, to three hours with people. There are fewer bookings but more concentration of time to get into the issues and help these people develop. The mix of content has changed rather than the volume remaining the same.”
Deloitte’s Wakefield says exceptional companies with strong leaders have mentoring programs. “If you picked off the top 100 ASX organisations, the vast majority of those that are performing well would have mentoring and coaching as a key assessment criteria of their leaders,’’ she says.
“I don’t think they outsource it to HR; they do it internally. It’s the responsibility of the leader who is able to support and mentor their people’s development.”
Mentoring is a key part of operations at Deloitte Australia. Every one of its 5,500 employees is mentored, regardless of the role they play. From top to bottom, it is all done internally.
“We have a structure inside our organisation where every single person has a counselling manager and then a counselling partner. If you’re a manager or below, you have a counselling manager and a counselling partner and if you’re a director and above, you will have a counselling partner and the key responsibility of that counselling partner is actually to mentor you through your career,’’ Wakefield says.
Some staff members even have more than one mentor, outside that formal structure. Wakefield mentors a dozen people inside her human capital consulting business but also mentors people in other parts of the business.
“I am also a mentor to someone in tax and someone in audit. I don’t have any formal working relationship with them but they have identified that they want additional support and coaching and counselling and mentoring,” she says.
Mentoring is particularly important for high-talent people, Wakefield says. “It makes the difference as to whether or not someone has exceptional growth in a year or not. I have an exceptionally good mentor and it’s made the world of difference to me over the last 12 to 18 months.”
Chip McFarlane, a director at the Institute of Coaching, says it’s not so much a case that operational skills are being replaced. It’s more a matter of them being supplemented.
“I don’t think the shift is away from business fundamentals,’’ McFarlane says. “That’s still important. But included now is the other side of things. It’s about bringing people along, so you get their discretionary effort, they’re inspired to be with you and when you hit the hard yards, they want to be there.
“We’re seeing it more and more in banking and financial services, professional services firms and with engineering firms … where people are looking towards mentoring as a way of engaging the older individuals and more experienced individuals and also the younger less experienced individuals in the organisations.”
“We are also getting a lot of reverse-mentoring where you get quite a few entrepreneurs who have made hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars by the time they hit 25 and they are beginning to mentor people who are entering the workforce now as sole traders and looking to build their smaller businesses. We are also finding in organisations, particularly in law firms, where Gen Y individuals who are tech-savvy and know how to use social media and they are starting to mentor some of the older partners using social media and interacting in the electronic space differently.”
He says Boral is an example of a shift in mindset for boards in the wake of the skills crisis. “Boards are looking for something different because when you alienate too many people then you become a liability,’’ McFarlane says.
He says surveys in banking and financial services reveal that people who participated in the mentoring program both as mentors and mentees showed a markedly higher engagement score in the organisation in comparison to their peers who didn’t participate in it. “They are adding value to other areas of the organisation,’’ he says.
He says mentoring usually works best when it’s done by someone outside of that department. It just gives more perspective. With one of his clients, for example, the CFO is mentoring someone in sales.
Measuring the return companies get from mentoring can be complicated. “It depends on what you look for the return in,’’ he says. “You look for a return in people who will give their discretionary effort to the business so they’re trying harder. But if you’re looking only for a bottom-line result, there is no correlation to adding in mentoring efforts. It has to be bigger than that. It has to be part of the overall fabric, the overall approach.”
And companies need to do it carefully. Mentors need to be trained, which can come at up to $20,000 per executive, and it should not be forced on them. “It’s not a silver bullet to solve everything,’’ he says. “Sometimes the problem is coming in where the mentors are sometimes mandated and the individual who is the mentor hasn’t been vetted, they aren’t taught mentoring skills and so they fumble through the relationship.
“When it’s not set up well, we find you can create a wonderful mentoring program but people stumble, it’s haphazard, it’s not as focused and not as successful.”
Margaret Harrison, who runs Our HR Company, says the way to measure the success of a mentoring program is to check the HR metrics such as staff turnover, absenteeism, productivity, sick leave, team efficiency and people seeking out training.
She says she expects more companies will embrace the concept as more women get on to boards. “The more women who get on boards there might be a greater focus on it,’’ Harrison says.
“It’s a real male thing. You probably would get howled out of town for saying that but women are much better at people issues and much better at understanding that people issues can affect the bottom line.”
You can follow Leon Gettler on Twitter @leongettler. This article first appeared on LeadingCompany. Download your free LeadingCompany eBook “10 Key Considerations for Succession and Business Exits”.
