When legendary songster Tony Bennett collaborated with pop starlet Lady Gaga last year, the partnership seemed unlikely, if not a little crazy. Sixty years and more than a few musical genres, after all, separate the two.
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Yet, in sharing what both later described as a mentoring relationship, the unusual team managed to bring out the best in each other’s talents—even winning the 2015 Grammy award for “Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album.”
Whether you look at it as the “Tony Bennett effect” or the “Lady Gaga effect,” it’s a fact that mentoring has come a long way, says Bill Gentry, director, leadership insights and analytics, and senior research scientist with the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, North Carolina.
And in a growing number of companies today, such coaching is no longer a highly informal, random pairing of protégés or peers. “Mentoring is a mutually beneficial relationship that helps both the mentor and mentee,” he says. “We as leaders need to be both.”
Proving the Value
While companies are finding more opportunities for mentoring today, proving the positive outcomes of mentor activities can help ensure ongoing buy-in and support from both managers and participants. But because mentor/protégé relations are all about human behavior and interaction, executives have found it hard to quantify how mentoring programs meet goals.
Against this backdrop, however, lies nearly 4 decades of academic research showing benefits for mentors and protégés.
University of Miami Professor of Management Terri A. Scandura, PhD, has studied mentoring and work relationships for many years. She says leaders in most Fortune 500 companies now see mentoring as an important employee development tool, with 71 percent having mentoring programs.
“Research has shown that when there’s an effective match between mentor and mentee, positive things happen,” she says. “Employees who have mentors tend to earn more, advance more quickly, learn faster on the job, are better socialized into the organization and are more productive. And, the benefits go both ways.”
The upshot: Mentoring has quickly become a best practice for corporations—and their executives remain very interested in furthering the process, she says.
How It’s Done
Though some mentoring relationships still form naturally, without a structured program, it can be hit or miss as to whether a protégé will find a mentor. But the advantages this relationship confers are too vital to just leave modern mentoring to chance, experts say.
And while leaders in some organizations simply track certain aspects of participation—such as whether and how often pairs meet—or ask participants to evaluate their experiences, others take their objectives much further.
At IBM Corporation, for example, the concept of the traditional manager/protégé approach has been totally reinvented. The company crafted a portfolio of formal and informal mentoring tools that match its workforce needs and blend all kinds of goals and methods, says Audrey J. Murrell, PhD, associate professor of business administration, psychology, and public and international affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, as well as associate dean of the school’s college of business administration.
Instead of a one-size-fits-all program, the initiative uses a smorgasbord of styles, including peer, group, expert, just-in-time, reverse, and virtual mentoring activities, says Murrell, who is also coauthor of Intelligent Mentoring: How IBM Creates Value through People, Knowledge, and Relationships (IBM Press). She describes the approach as “push-and-connect mentoring.”
For instance, the company offers what it calls “speed mentoring cafés,” where experienced mentors meet with protégés in group settings for what she calls “topical mentor moments.” Interestingly, it’s not unlike speed dating.
The Bond Runs Deep
And at audit, tax, and advisory firm KPMG LLP, every new employee is assigned a transitional coach, who can either become the employee’s mentor or facilitate a handoff to another mentor. Mentoring’s available to all employees, regardless of position or career track, and the firm offers incentives to participants. Mentors and mentees receive training, and serving as a mentor is a part of performance reviews.
More recently, KPMG deepened its mentoring strategy by launching its “Leaders Engaging Leaders” program, which pairs 60 top managers with members of the management committee, the board of directors, and national managing partners.
The program aims to show mentees that even though there may be a few rungs of the corporate ladder left, it doesn’t mean they’re stuck in the jobs they’re doing now. Additionally, the mentor/mentee relationship at KPMG is meant to evolve into long-term sponsorship. As bonds form, the connection grows from a coach, who tells you what to do, to that of a mentor, who offers advice, to that of a sponsor, who advocates for you.
Tomorrow’s Advisor checks out four ways to advance your mentoring program to best-practice status.