Replying to LO15796
Mentoring program
Ann Reilly,
We are in the process of implementing a mentoring program
into our organization for our middle managers (business unit
managers). It is a standard program in terms of its
infrastructure, but the development and learning activities
the group will engage in are work based.
We have taken the approach (as does the program structure)
that mentoring is a support process to any type of
development and learning, therefore it should be
standardized, even though the experiences of the individual
are quite different between individuals.
A problem we faced when looking to implement a traditional
one-to-one mentoring program is that we had plenty of
mentees but few good candidates for mentors, given the
relatively small size (under 1000) and sharply hierarchical
makeup of the company, so we researched and chose a new
program which has a basis of groups of up to 25 managers and
one mentor. The strength of the system is between the
mentees, with the mentor acting more as a facilitator for
regular (monthly) meetings.
We are still working out the challenge of making monthly
meetings a reality with geographically dispersed managers
and a tight travel budget. Perhaps a technology solution
would be appropriate if the quality of the interaction
didn't suffer.
Incidentally, one key to the success of the development
program is the availability of work or projects that stretch
people's skills; our first task was to identify all of the
'things that were going on here' and we found that we had
more projects - and quite challenging ones, outside the
normal day to day activity - than we could possibly handle
with the senior management resources currently assigned. A
related challenge is having an appropriate project
management methodology in place so that these managers will
be developing the skills we need in a relatively controlled
manner.
Sorry to witter on so. If you would like the name of the
company that offers the mentoring program, please email me
directly.
Regards,
Ryder Jones
--Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>