Mentoring - then and now

I joined the workforce in the early – mid-eighties. Quite frankly, the word ‘mentoring’ was rarely if ever heard. And that too only in the corridors of organizations that had robust and positive people practices.

It’s not as if I didn’t have a mentor. In fact most young professionals at the start of their careers had mentors except that most of them didn’t know it or didn’t use the term ‘mentor’ to refer to these experienced, senior, at-times-serious but always well meaning gentlemen (and occasionally women).

Times were different. It was through the eyes of these seniors (mentors) that we saw the organization – especially those parts that were not visible from where we were – at the bottom of the ladder and at a remote location far away from the corporate office.

Today, electronic / digital in-house daily newsletters tell you at the end of each day in fairly great and graphic detail, what has happened during the day – and that is, if you are not following your company and its CEO on social media – which is also quite rare.

Those who are ‘online’ therefore get to know things on an almost real time basis.

As a matter of fact, our generation acquired all of its information about the world we lived in from seniors of some sort – parents, teachers, uncles, aunts, older siblings and then of course our seniors at the workplace.

And then suddenly it changed and came along a generation which simply googled anything and everything they ever wanted to know. And seniors – both within organizations and elsewhere in society – became redundant at least as suppliers of information.

The kind of mentoring that happened back then was also characterised by an almost complete lack of guidelines, procedures and monitoring mechanisms. It was almost a by product of the company culture.

With the millennials also came a higher rate of growth of the Indian Economy, attrition, talent shortage(s) etc. For an economy that always grew at ‘hindu rate’ and given demographic features of Indian Labour market, sudden and significantly higher rate of attrition came as a surprise to many HR leaders and their CEOs.

It was almost unanimously agreed that there was an urgent need to strengthen communication with the freshers in the organization since in most companies’ talent left between the third day and upto within three years.

So mentoring was re-visited, dusted and given a fresh coat of paint.

Mentors were identified, mentees by default were the new joinees, mentees were assigned to mentors, mentoring skills workshops were held to handhold both mentors and mentees to effectively discharge their respective roles.

Ofcourse, templates and dashboards followed for the ‘management’ to be able to monitor how effectively mentoring was happening.

In due course, many organizations and many leaders (particularly those who had witnessed or been through the process of mentoring earlier in their career) realized that with all the official resources, sponsorship and monitoring it wasn’t happening as effectively as it used to when it was left to happen all by itself. This was both worrying and frustrating.

Most human and social processes and their outcomes are not deterministic. Sometimes they are not even probabilistic. Hence, it is never easy to diagnose such situations and arrive at a reliable and dependable cause-and-effect relationship.

Many discussions and fire-side chats have taken place on ‘how to make mentoring more effective’ in these past 12 to 15 years. The subject has also found a place in seminars and conferences on Human Resource and Talent Management.

My humble take on what is most likely to have happened:

1.?????Mentoring thrives on the spirit of volunteerism

2.?????Whenever we make things prescriptive and proscriptive, things tend to get ritualised.

3.?????Emerging out of volunteerism, mentors and mentees should choose each other – with the mentee choosing the mentor being more important of the two.

4. Mentoring is a life long process and should be left to the mentee and the mentor to decide its course

As a result, today many organizations claim to be practising mentoring but alas, its effectiveness is far from satisfactory.

Can we turn the clock back and go back to mentoring as it used to happen….?

That is a question each organization must choose to answer for itself.

Disclaimer: some organizations, some mentees and some mentors continue to practice mentoring in the spirit of volunteerism notwithstanding the “official guideline”. ?