Mentoring: The Missing Ingredient in AEC Leadership Development

“Please provide me with a mentor.”

“I could use a person to help guide me through the leadership transition.”

We often hear phrases like this at the Engineering Management Institute when we collect data to design custom leadership and project management programs for AEC firms, specifically when we ask, “How can your company better support your development?” Also, when we ask leaders for the most impactful lessons or facilitators of their development, they often respond with, “I had a great mentor.”

The challenge is that mentoring isn't happening as often as it used to or as often as it should in the AEC industry. It seems that everyone is too busy today, both those who could potentially be mentors and those who could use mentoring, and they just don't see the value in taking the time to foster these important connections and conversations.

Therefore, in this post, I want to share three ways that AEC organizations can facilitate mentoring as part of their leadership development process.

#1 Create a Formal Mentoring Program

Many AEC organizations have formal mentoring programs. Typically, these programs include an application process, through which a professional interested in mentoring would detail their background, their interests, and their goals for obtaining a mentor. Then the company, most likely the HR department, will find a mentor who would be a good match for the candidate. Depending on how robust the program is, there may be very specific guidelines and meeting times, or it may be up to the mentor and mentee to find a time and frequency that works for them. Either way, a formal program sends a strong message to your next generation of leaders that you are supporting them in their growth. Programs like this can also foster great relationships between generations because of the interaction in these mentoring discussions.

One important aspect of a formal mentoring program is to consider confidentiality. I was involved in one of these programs in the past and my mentor and I had to sign a form stating that everything we spoke about was in confidence. This is important, because if the mentee is having an issue with someone in their office, they need to be comfortable discussing it with their mentor.?

The downside to the formal mentoring program, of course, is that it will take time, energy, and effort to get it off the ground, but it can be a wonderful program that will benefit all parties involved, including the organization as a whole.?

#2 Facilitate Natural Mentoring

Whether or not your organization has a formal mentoring program, you can also look for ways to naturally facilitate mentoring. Creating events or avenues for less experienced professionals to connect and build relationships with more experienced professionals will allow mentoring conversations to happen organically. This might happen through regular social events at each of your office locations, or a larger annual team building event where professionals of various experience levels can connect and spend time together.

One of the things that we recommend to our clients when we build learning and development programs is that even if it is a foundational project management course for beginners, we ask them to have their senior project managers take the course as well, so that they're able to mentor and guide the less experienced project managers on the topics that are being taught to them. This has worked extremely well for some of our clients, ensuring that mentoring happens over the course of the program.

#3 Build a Mentoring Mindset Across Your Organization

At the Engineering Management Institute, our values are very clear: give, guide, and grow. We give our all, we guide each other, and we grow together. We talk about these values at the beginning of all of our calls and include them on all of our materials, as well as right in the center of our logo. What this has allowed us to do is to build a mindset among our team members of giving, guiding, and therefore growing.

AEC organizations can facilitate mentoring by making it an important part of their value system. Regularly talking about the importance of mentoring and guiding each other will encourage people to do it more frequently. This is critical, because without this reinforcement, people will continue to get caught up in their own tasks and forget about helping others. You must build this mindset throughout your organization and to do so, you must reinforce it consistently.

Mentoring is often the missing ingredient in leadership development within AEC organizations, and I hope that by utilizing some of the strategies that I've discussed in this article, you can ensure that it won't be missing in your organization.?

Anthony Fasano, P.E.

Engineering Management Institute | 800-920-4007 www.EngineeringManagementInstitute.org