Relationships That Work

By Michelle R. Davis, Writer

Along a winding career path, it’s crucial to have a trusted guide to help lead you in the right direction. A professional mentor can help employees avoid pitfalls and hone their skills, pass along institutional knowledge and encourage new levels of experience.

Private mentors, informal relationships and company-wide mentoring programs are all ways for employees to seek out more experienced professionals to help them skip over some of the more painful career learning experiences.

"A good mentor needs be well connected in the community. He or she needs to be able to open doors and not merely give advice here and there," says Debra Davenport, CEO and president of DavenportFolio, which provides mentoring services. "The best mentors want their protégés to be more successful then they are."

Professional mentors may provide résumé advice, teach high-level communication skills, help map out a business plan or be a connector to leaders in the field.

A mentee can tap into a senior person’s knowledge and rapidly gain from his or her experience. The relationship may be about learning technical skills, getting career guidance or having a trusted adviser to provide feedback on ideas.

Mentorships at Work

Some companies have formal, in-house mentoring programs to pass on the skills required to be a leader at a large corporation. One of these is Wachovia Corp., a financial services organization with 120,000 employees.

Russ Moon (MBA ’05), assistant vice president of the strategic research team at Wachovia, has been a mentor and a mentee throughout his career. “Typically, you find someone who is going to share their knowledge and experience in order to support you as you pursue your goals,” says Moon, who has participated in his company’s mentorship program as well as developing mentoring relationships through other venues.

"Some may help you clarify where you’re actually going," adds Moon, "and typically the good ones will challenge you and catalyze your growth as they get to know you."

But the benefits aren’t all for the mentee. "Mentoring is almost the best of both worlds," Moon says. “It gives you a chance to share your expertise and experience with someone else to accelerate their development, and it sharpens your own understanding of yourself."

It’s also simply rewarding, he notes.

Finding an Outside Mentor

Outside of company mentorship programs and other sponsored programs, it’s important to think carefully about whom to approach as a potential mentor, according to John Robinson, president and CEO of the National Minority Business Council.

"It should be someone who does not see this as a threat to his or her own business," Robinson points out. "Someone who has been in the business for 30 or 40 years and is secure in their market situation is more willing to sit down with a younger entrepreneur and share. Nobody wants to cede market share."

Influential Relationships

Mentoring can have an important impact on the workplace. For example, many school districts have mentoring programs that pair new teachers with more experienced colleagues.

Studies show that a high-quality mentoring program can increase the number of new teachers who remain in the field to more than 88%, according to Greg Johnson, a senior policy analyst with the National Education Association’s teacher quality department. Typically, about a third of beginning teachers leave within the first three years on the job, Johnson says.

Just having a mentoring program is not enough, however. The program needs to be well designed, Johnson says. Characteristics of a superior mentoring program are sanctioned time for the mentor and mentee to meet, rigorous training for the mentor, pairing employees in similar fields and documenting progress.

With many baby boomers set to retire, large companies are using mentoring as a way to pass on institutional and job knowledge, notes Paul David Walker, a professional coach and mentor and author of the book Unleashing Genius.

"It is critical to transfer that knowledge before the boomers retire," says Walker, who is also a board member of the Professional Coaches and Mentors Association. "If they don’t, they won’t have a business [left]."

Walker also provides mentors for CEOs of mid-size companies, who often have no internal options for mentoring. "They can’t talk openly to their board or to their own employees who have a personal agenda," he points out. "The old phrase, ‘It’s lonely at the top,’ is true."

A Work in Progress

Like parenting, mentoring relationships change over time. For example, Debra Davenport used to have a mentee who worked in an administrative job in Phoenix, Ariz., and wanted to make a career change. The mentee was bright, had an affinity for politics and "was working far below her capability level," Davenport says.

Davenport encouraged her to get into politics and do more public speaking, writing and blogging. Within six months, the mentee had moved to Washington, D.C., where she now holds a high-level administrative post in a federal agency.

Now, Davenport says, the relationship is between two colleagues, not between a mentor and mentee. "It’s very much a sowing-seed philosophy," she says. "These become some of the most long-term, valuable and trusted relationships you will ever develop in your life."