Mentoring the mentors

If you want to stay relevant and employable, you need to do more than just keep up. Heidi Holmes says a mentor program can improve workplace cohesiveness and knowledge sharing.

The world is moving faster than it ever has before and the need to keep up is becoming more and more important. Despite what some people might think, no one is bigger than change and if you want to stay relevant and employable… well, you need to do more than just keep up!

Mentoring is an ancient personal development tool that is still widely embraced across many societies and cultures today. While some mentoring relationships develop in an informal and natural way, other relationships are formed in a very structured and managed approach. And this is one of the beautiful things about mentoring – there is no set formula for success.

Millennials now make up more than half the global workforce, outnumbering both Gen X and the baby boomers. While millennials tend to get a bad rap, employers need to recognise that this is the future of their workforce (if it isn’t already!) Therefore, organisations that want to attract the best and brightest talent need to acknowledge and accept that the way in which people work and want to work has changed.

Despite popular belief, a study by Harvard Business Review found that while millennials were in a hurry for success, they were in fact open to feedback and had reasonable expectations about their future. This is good news for employers as these are attributes of what could be a highly engaged and ambitious employee. What the employer needs to figure out is how best to coach these younger employees to ensure they not only get the most out of them, but also retain them.

At the other end of the spectrum, employers are also facing a massive challenge with regards to their ageing workforce. How do they ensure valuable company IP is not lost when a mass number of baby boomers decide to retire?

Enter mentoring!

In its purist form, a mentoring relationship works by where usually an older, wiser person mentors a younger, more junior person. However, in recent years the concept of reverse mentoring is sparking a lot more interest across HR and L&D professionals. With the ever changing technological landscape, now there is an increasing opportunity for senior executives within a company to learn something new from their younger colleagues. From the latest app they may be using to manage their own workflow, to insights into how to use social media to engage with a new customer, millennials have many valuable insights that are often overlooked because of their level of seniority in a company.

Mentoring facilitates the breakdown of hierarchical structures, allowing for improved workplace cohesiveness as well as knowledge sharing. This can also indirectly become part of a wider succession planning strategy for an organisation.

This can be made all the more efficient and effective through the implementation of a corporate mentor program supported by cloud based mentor management software.

Never has it been easier and more cost effective to implement a people oriented workplace strategy that will not only benefit your individual employees but also company-wide culture.

0 Comments

1. 

   Lily_Rose

   August 5, 2016 at 9:26 am

   Mentoring

   Actually, millennials already make for the largest part of workforce, according to various reports. But why do you say they have a bad rap? I totally agree with the opinion expressed by Forbes here – we are no worse than all other generations and motivated the same way. We are even better in some ways, for instance, in the fact that we can express our wishes straightforwardly. As for mentoring, it is an efficient practice. We practice it in our team. However, it has nothing to do with age, only experience. More experienced developers and designers mentor the junior ones. It is nice because the beginners blend into the team faster and feel the support.