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Mentoring is arguably the most cost-effective developmental intervention an organization can introduce. It has a significant positive impact on the participants (both mentors and mentees), the organization, and key third parties such as mentees’ line managers. Let’s examine how each of these benefit from a comprehensive mentoring program.
Benefits for the organization
Retention
The most often measured benefit that mentoring brings to an organization is employee retention. At Allied Irish Bank, the loss of employees who were recent university graduates in their first 12 months had remained consistent for some years at about 25 percent. The introduction of a mentoring program was the only significant change in managing recent graduates. They chose their mentors at a training event, which prepared them for managing the relationship. The program also involved groups of graduates meeting with their mentors every few weeks. Some of the graduates then had one-on-one mentoring sessions with their mentor. Over the course of one year, the mentoring program reduced the loss of graduates by two-thirds.
In GlaxoSmithKline’s finance division, the turnover among the 100 participants in a mentoring program was a mere 2 percent, compared with 27.5 percent among other employees. Various surveys show that people who have a mentor are, on average, only half as likely to consider changing employers. Other data from Clutterbuck Associates’ research suggests that only one in five employees looking for a new job searches for a new post within the same company, but four out of five of those who have a mentor look within the same company.
Recruitment
Having a mentoring program is a significant factor in an employee’s selection of an employer. Mentors also provide a very cost-effective means of re-capturing talented employees who have moved to other organizations. When these employees are ready to move again, the first person they often talk to is their former mentor, if they have had a good mentoring relationship.
Induction into the organization is also typically improved by mentoring. People who participate in an organization’s mentoring program become acclimatized to their new organization up to twice as quickly as normal. At senior management levels, where the track record of success in external appointments is not high in general, mentoring is believed to make a substantial difference in acceptance of the new manager.
Other key areas in which an organization can benefit from mentoring programs include:
- Succession planning
Many companies find that mentoring provides a clearer picture of the talent pool available, and helps people position themselves more clearly against the likely needs of the business.
- Merger and acquisition
Establishing mentoring relationships across the two organizations helps build trust and overcome cultural differences, making the integration process faster and more efficient. (It also helps to retain key people, who might otherwise have left because of uncertainty about their future.)
- Diversity management
Mentoring has proved to be one of the most important elements of diversity programs. Mentoring supports diversity by enabling people who might typically be excluded from the power networks in organizations to access a source of encouragement, career advice and personal challenge. They learn how organizational politics work and generally enhance the quality of their thinking about personal and career development. At the same time, having conversations that cross racial and gender differences educates mentors about diversity, leading to improved practice and opportunities for minorities in the business more generally.
When an organization has a strong cadre of effective mentors it has an impact on the overall culture of the organization. A number of organizations have used mentoring as the starting point for changing from a culture that was hostile toward learning to one that is very supportive of learning behaviors.
Benefits for the mentee
Mentees experience a number of benefits from participating in an organization’s mentoring program. The most commonly reported benefits include the following:
- Greater clarity about personal development and career goals
- The opportunity to discuss issues about their career and development in an open and unthreatening environment
- Improved networking
- Practical advice on organizational politics and behavior
- The opportunity to be challenged constructively
- The transfer of knowledge and, in particular, judgement
- A role model
Various research data suggest that mentees achieve greater confidence in their own potential and ability, feel more secure in their role (especially at senior levels), and earn more than their non-mentored counterparts.
Benefits for the mentor
The most frequently cited benefits for mentors are:
- Increasing their own learning (often mentors report they feel they have learned as much as or even more than mentees).
- Providing the opportunity to practice good developmental behaviors outside their direct area of responsibilities.
- Developing their self-awareness.
- Increasing their understanding of other areas of the business and/or of other cultures.
Benefits for the line manager
Line managers in effective mentoring programs typically comment upon:
- The value of a “second opinion”—someone the mentee can take issues to, who does not have any direct involvement in the mentee’s daily duties.
- Improvements in the mentee’s relationships with peers as well as with the line manager.
- A clearer sense of purpose and direction on the part of the mentee.
The bottom line is that mentoring achieves a great deal of change for the organization at relatively little cost. However, sufficient effort must be given at the start to ensure the program has real impetus, and at various points in the first two or three years to ensure that the process (and, therefore, the benefit) is sustained.
David Clutterbuck is an author and visiting professor of coaching and mentoring at both Sheffield Hallam and Oxford Brookes Universities. |
