Mentoring

Recently I had an opportunity to discuss with Meena, Senior Consultant with Mindtree, who was earlier the Associate Director – People Function heading HR for R&D Services at Mindtree, on the subject of Mentoring. During this interesting discussion, one important aspect which came out glaring was that most of the managers neglect / miss out “mentoring” their people and do not put conscious efforts to do this activity and monitor the same. The common reason that we get to hear is that we are pressed for time, we need to concentrate more on deliverables or we have hired talented / skilled people.
A lot of people issues like Employee engagement, identifying latent potential in employees, leadership development, experiential knowledge transfer, developing niche competencies in employees, creating a focussed platform for focussed learnings and many more, can be managed through structured mentoring programs.

So then, what is Mentoring? Mentoring is an experiential learning process where employees can learn from senior, more experienced employees. The learning process can be one on one or one to many. In rapidly evolving organizations, mentoring is a platform that can build “knowledge – connect” among employees at varied levels and create niche competencies in employees over time. It is a powerful concept that can foster holistic individual employee development. Mentoring can address the key business challenges every organization faces which are building a leadership pool, employee engagement and creating a knowledge base in specific competencies.

Most aspiring managers / new managers, need to be told the importance of mentoring and move away from only reviewing and directing our teams / people. This also applies to some existing managers across organizations. I feel mentoring leads to a couple of advantages like higher employee engagement, groom individual latent talent across all levels, groom future leaders, targeted knowledge transfer which would be transfer of BKM’s (best known methods), etc. It is required at all levels and a conscious efforts to build this as a culture internally within organizations.