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Mentoring benefits mentors, protégés and the organization:
Mentoring is a knowledge-sharing relationship that accelerates the expertise and organizational knowledge of protégés. It offers the mentor an opportunity to share a life time of experience, give back to the organization, and develop a new set of social connections at work. Mentoring couples knowledge to share with knowledge to gain for both mentor and protégé.
Mentors provide guidance and support on career issues as well as on personal issues that can affect career development. On the career front, a mentor educates, coaches, protects, sponsors and provides visibility and exposure. He or she helps a protégé to set development goals, provides feedback, and shares personal experiences and insights that are relevant to the needs of the protégé. On the personal side, a mentor is a role mode: he or she helps the protégé develop a greater sense of competence, encourages, counsels and can become a friend.
| It increases employee loyalty to the firm and increases the likelihood that talented employees will be retained. | |
| It is a seamless, relatively low cost way to transfer knowledge throughout the firm. | |
| It facilitates succession planning. | |
| It facilitates the communication of corporate vision and key messages. | |
| It builds depth to organizational networks. |
Mid-career employees and managers, who should be at their peak of productivity, are the most disaffected segment of the workforce. They are working more hours and enjoying it less than their older and younger colleagues. And most are looking for alternatives in their working lives.
Companies need to find ways to rekindle the fires of this vast, neglected group of people – or risk losing them altogether . Mentoring is one way to re-engage mid-career employees as mentors of their younger colleagues
A 2003 survey of 7,700 U.S. mid career employees (employees between the ages of 35 and 54), found that:
| One in four has supervisory responsibility. | |
| They tend to work longer hours than their older and younger counterparts. | |
| Only 33% say they feel energized by their work. | |
| 36% say they are in dead-end jobs. | |
| 40% report feelings of burnout. | |
| They have the lowest satisfaction rates with their immediate managers. | |
| They have the least confidence in top executives. | |
| 25% often disagrees with organization’s policies on important employee matters. | |
| 1 in 5 are seeking opportunities elsewhere. | |
| 85%, believe that career changes are difficult. | |
| Most are bound to make conservative choices because of family and financial pressures. | |
| At the same time, most people in this age group, were culturally formed during the age of the Vietnam War, the civil rights and women’s rights movements. They have had expectations that their working lives will be meaningful and full of promise. This contrasts with the previous generation of workers, who sought security and material success. And it is different from the newest generation of workers, who tend to regard work as a way to support their lives outside the work environment. | |
| Their feelings of frustration tend to be invisible, and so employers often, wrongly, assume that everything is fine. They view this age group as solid corporate citizens, committed and loyal. And they are wrong. | |
| As result of employer neglect for this cohort of employees, talented people retire early, or leave to start their own businesses. Disaffected people stay; and threaten productivity as “passive resistors”. | |
| Companies need to keep talent, and that means making work more enjoyable and enriching. Talented, mid-career employees (not just the stars) need to be re-engaged in the workplace by giving them the occasion for renewal. Mentoring is a vehicle for renewal. |
© Leap Corporation 2009