Mentoring - The Business Case

Why should a business bother with mentoring? – the benefits to the individual seem apparent, but what is the payoff for the organisation?

This short article explains the business case. It can be useful for those who wish to gain commitment internally to implement a mentoring programme within their company

Mentoring is considered to be one of the critical skills in developing high performing companies as organisations look at how knowledge is transferred.

Being at the heart of a pacesetting business is great, but it brings increasing pressures. We all need a chance to recentre, take time out with someone we respect, get anoverview of our options and raise the quality of our decisions.

'Unofficial mentoring’ and executive mentoring has always been a part of high performing companies. While this is useful, an even greater benefit can be derived by developing a more business-like way of passing on knowledge and enabling those with high potential to be clear how best to contribute to the aspirations of the business.

This releases leaders to focus on shaping tomorrow’s business, while rising managers can focus on managing today’s business. Companies will need lots of self-managing people in the future; people who can find their own solutions to challenges.

Its current attraction is that it is one of the mechanisms which can powerfully assist organisations face the future world of work and its challenges – challenges such as the total transformation of customer demands, the changing nature of global, highly competitive, fast paced economies, the revolution in information and communication technologies, the management of talent.

Peak Performing Organisations

Good mentoring has become a key component of laying the foundations for ongoing success. Many leading edge businesses are using mentoring both internally and externally as a powerful catalyst for peak performance. It aims at real knowledge transfer in a practical and structured way. It most certainly moves intent into action. Building mentoring faculties inside companies is a powerful mechanism.

The mentor’s role is to help the mentee reach their picture of success – for their role, their team or the organisation as a whole.

Much of what we have all traditionally followed in recent years regarding the directing of performance is now inappropriate and the approach to building high performing businesses has been turned on its head. Senior people more and more want the personal touch; to take time out with someone who has credibility in their eyes. CEO’s have been doing it for years.

The new rules in the future world of work will create new contracts between employers and employees. Future leading edge businesses will be values driven, highly focused and niche providers. They will create leadership ability at many levels and use the values as a moral compass which guides behaviour and enables self-management.

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Mentoring & Talent Management

An overwhelming cry from successful organisations is their need to recruit, reward and retain superb people. There is little point in chasing ambitious goals without the right people to deliver results, people who are self managing and who have a values ‘fit’.

They know that they have made themselves vulnerable sometimes in not pulling a pipeline of talent through the business. This has left them exposed when key people leave. Mentoring can contribute here.

Leading edge businesses understand that to succeed they need to build on their people’s talent and their strengths, not focus on their weaknesses. They need to put the emphasis on the ‘engine’ in their people, not the ‘trailer’. A natural belief from this is that people’s greatest potential for development lies in their area of greatest strength, not in their area of weakness. This is totally transforming the thinking about the way learning and development plans are shaped. Building on strengths can deliver excellence, building on weakness is at best remedial.

Mentoring is being used as a key vehicle in helping people identify and build on their strengths and craft their best contribution to the business.

Do you have your strengths at the heart of the job you do? How much are you getting sucked into other things which are not where you excel.? This is hardly fulfilling for you and of less commercial value to your organisation. A mentor can help you discover the key areas where you can be brilliant – where you are guaranteed to deliver results.

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