The Case for a Robust Formal Mentoring System
Perrone-Ambrose Associates has for 3 decades helped organizations develop and run well thought-out, formal mentoring programs.
Benefits of a Robust Mentoring System:
1. Provides the organization with a process for making professional growth and development a conscious priority.
2. Enables the organization to ensure that lessons of experience, cultural values, core competencies and critical skill sets are passed on in a focused and deliberate fashion.
3. Engages employees at all levels who are invested in accelerating the pace and quality of their professional growth and competence with a more experienced learning partner dedicated to their professional success.
4. Pushes employees to intentionally pursue the achievement of their full potential while making their maximum contribution to the organization.
5. Encourages mentees to focus on being lifelong learners by stressing the need to proactively initiate learning versus just reacting to daily tasks.
6. Supplies less experienced mentees with more seasoned advisors in turbulent and uncertain economic times, who can provide an empathic nonjudgmental setting to air mentee anxieties. Experienced mentors share a context and a long-range perspective that helps mentees better understand short-term crises and setbacks.
7. Links employees with mentors who are committed to the organization and who are dedicated to their success, resulting in more powerful employee engagement. The employee experiences being valued and genuinely cared about by someone who believes in and exhibits the organization’s values and guiding principles.
8. Involves mentors with an opportunity to interact with mentees who are different from themselves in terms of age, backgrounds and experience thereby offering mentors a fresh perspective and generational view different from their own.
9. Strengthens mentors as they further their own leadership skills in developing others and becoming inspirational models helping people achieve their full potential.