The Role of Mentors in Effective Implementation of Mentoring Programs

Mentors are of two types: role model mentors and facilitative mentors. Role model mentors provide the protégé with new information sources and specific learning resources, and tell the person by dint of their experience what will work and what will not work. Facilitative mentors on the other hand, adopt a more focused approach and help protégés explore their own issues, build their own awareness, and develop their own unique way of handling things.

While transferring knowledge from the incumbent to the successor remains a key requirement of the succession planning exercise, effective mentoring for succession planning requires focusing on developing the protégé's skills to achieve performance goals based on anticipated future challenges facing the industry. This requires the facilitative type of mentors.Having set out the mentoring program and the process of implementation, there should be an assigned role of monitoring to ensure that the whole program is a success. The mentor’s role in the whole process of program implementation is a participatory one and not that of a spectator. He has been with the protégés and have got a personal touch with them, bearing in mind their personalities and individual differences.

The mentor should look at the fundamentals. (Randy Pausch, 2008: The Last Lecture). He should try to make the protégés to be self reflective. The protégé should have a sense of their flaws. Are they realistic of about how others view them? Each protégé responds to the change mechanism based on their personalities. Hence, the mentor should observe closely their performance and attitude towards these changes.”Employees will alter their mind-sets only if they see the point of the change and agree with it—at least enough to give it a try. The surrounding structures (reward and recognition systems, for example) must be in tune with the new behavior. Employees must have the skills to do what it requires. Finally, they must see people they respect modeling it actively’’

Inculcate the winning big spirit within protégés. Efficient team meetings should be part of the implementation process so that the mentor evaluates the improvement pattern and its sustenance tempo. There should be behavioural expectations, behavioural matrix and implementation checklist. Look at benchmark of quality to begin to understand the use of the tool in self evaluation.

Identify new knowledge needs as you do the monitoring without alienating the protégés. Knowledge acquisition is all about people. New knowledge requires them to change the way they have always done things or behaved preciously. This entails leaving the comfort zone. The mentor should be careful in doing this because people do not like change. They tend to resist, complain and often leave the organisation. Unless protégés are involved from the onset, a new knowledge acquisition poses a threat to their values and mindset. The mentor should be very collaborative with the protégés and the management as well to ensure that the whole process is still aligned to organisation’s missions and goals for employees. Success of the whole program means-everybody succeeds.

The performance of protégés should be measured against each deliverables. Performance measures should adopt the right FABRIC:

§  Focused on your department’s/organisation’s aims and objectives,  relevant to what you are aiming to achieve and the scale and complexity of the particular measure or package of measures;

§  Appropriate and useful for those who will use these measures.  The mentor’s performance measures should clearly link outcomes to organisation’s work (establishing intermediate outcomes if final outcomes are subject to too many factors that are not directly in the control of the organisation);

§  Balanced in their reflection of priorities and total effort;

§  Robust - data should be clearly defined and collected consistently, measures should be easy to understand and use, data should be collected frequently enough to track progress, and quickly enough for the data to still be useful, measures should be reliable, comparable and verifiable;

§  Integrated in existing performance management processes; and

§  Cost-effective

Finally, the mentor should beware of the various obstacles that may impede the whole implementation program such as:

§  Obstacles to decision

§  Board resistance

§  Competing big priorities

§  Management opposition or inertia

§  Lack of awareness of the issue

§  No existing code of conduct

§  Cost concerns

§  No clearly assigned responsibility for the implementation process

References:     
 1. http://blink.ucsd.edu/HR/supervising/succession/index.html#, 2010
 2. "Mentoring and Succession Management: An Evaluative Approach to the Strategic     Collaboration    Model(Haynes, Ray K. & Ghosh, Rajashi:2008)
 3. The psychology of change management( Emily Lawson and Colin Price:2006)