Corporate Mentoring

If The Answer Is A Combination of Coaching And Technology, Then What Is The Question…

How Can More Organisations Harness The Power Of Informal Learning And Knowledge Sharing, In A Way That Can Duplicate And Scale Effectively?

The Business and Executive Coaching industry has long known the value of mentoring within an organisation. Executive Coaching often occurs at the C and SVP levels within larger organisations. What is less obvious is how much structured mentoring and informal knowledge sharing is being effectively carried out at middle management level and down to team leaders.

Even if this knowledge transfer is occurring, typically the knowledge is not being capture in a way that it can be leveraged throughout the organisation.

Arguably one of the biggest opportunities in businesses of all shapes and sizes it to put structure around the informal learning or mentoring process.

Whilst this has significant value for any business bigger than sole trader, the benefits are exponential in larger corporates due to their size, complex processes, large communities and the vast amount of knowledge across the broad network of employees.

The larger the organisation the bigger the value and opportunity to harness the Intellectual Property contained within their teams, both from the top down and the bottom-up.

So how do you harness the power of informal learning, capture the IP in the heads of your best people and leverage the process of transferring knowledge within the organisation?

The answer may be in building community engagement, making it convenient and easy to do and, most importantly, making the outcomes relevant and beneficial.

Many larger organisations already have formal mentoring programs, but the success often depends on how well systemised the process is and whether the engagement process fits with today’s hectic schedules and is adding value to the Mentee and Mentor.

Technology Victory

Technology plays a pivotal role and amplifies the potential for success of a structured mentoring program, giving the mentoring program the ability to scale and amplify the impact across an organisation. With key people often busy, traveling or working remotely, physical face-to-face meetings may be less frequent, however video technology and webinars are now making it easy to run individual or group mentoring sessions.

Having said that, the secret is to make sure the informal gets delivered consistently and effectively by having an internal advocate being coached on how to implement and manage an effective mentoring program.

The upfront training for the mentoring program managers as well as the ongoing training of Mentors and Mentees is critical to the success of any mentoring program.

There are 3 Key Benefits for an organisation with a well-run Mentoring Program

1. Reduction in staff turnover and savings in recruiting costs
2. It is a guarantee all your best people will exit the business eventually for one reason or another, so knowledge transfer and retention is critical.
3. Fast tracks the growth of leadership capacity, capability and depth of knowledge within the company.

Scaling an effective mentoring program requires a structured process that starts with keeping the Mentors and Mentees accountable to each other in a user-friendly manner.

The program manager must also have a way of tracking the engagement within the, community and for larger organisations the growth, uptake or participation in the program.

Without measurable visibility of the mentoring community engagement, the program manager is not able to monitor the health and effectiveness of the mentoring program.

The old saying is ‘what gets measured gets managed’. It is this visibility over engagement that gives the Mentoring Program manager the insights to make informed decisions on what action might need to be taken to get the most out of the mentoring experience, both for the organisation and the employees.

Technology, the Grease or the Friction Point

Technology can make or break a mentoring program. There are 2 big mistakes many organisations make when it comes to technology for running a Mentoring Program:

1. They try to run a mentoring program on the business and HR tools they use in their everyday business, or
2. They purchase mentoring software that is not engaging for their team and does not have the flexibility to adapt to the changing needs of their business.

In the case of trying to implement a mentoring program without dedicated mentoring software, the engagement, capture and transfer of knowledge becomes very complex and a training challenge in its own right.

The result is that effective outcomes become near impossible to measure.

Using dedicated mentoring software is a critical piece of the puzzle for creating engagement, capturing the knowledge being transferred and ensuring the success and scalability of an organisations Mentoring Program.

From a HR Professionals perspective, there are 5 key areas they need to focus on which Executive Coaches can support them on:

1. Assist with securing the support from key executives for a formal mentoring program.
2. Help with creating a business plan for implementation and delivery of the mentoring program
3. Design the best model for mentoring within the organisation
4. Assist with delivering the internal communications around the Mentoring Program to ensure buy in from employees
5. Support the delivery of a pilot program and advise on how to optimise the Mentoring Program based on feedback from the pilot program
6. Ongoing advice and support for the Mentoring Program managers and mentors

If an organisation does not already have an effective and successful Mentoring Program, then the harsh reality is that the current dynamics within the organisation mean it is unlikely they will successfully implement a Mentoring Program without the support of an Executive Coach to mentor the organisation management as well as mentor the mentors.

For details on the mentoring platform CLM is using with our own clients, visit: http://www.coachinglife.com.au/mentifi