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Benefits of mentoring in the company Francisco Giménez Plano, Augere CEO

Mentoring benefits both mentor and mentee, but it benefits the company too. Mentoring helps other people acquire the form and behaviour of the company leadership style, and helps key people in the organisation to take responsibility for their own professional development.

Summary

• People development programmes are intended to identify people of great potential, and mentoring is one of these.a las personas con alto potencial y diseñar su desarrollo es el objetivo de los programas

• Mentoring is a tool for developing high potential people. It is an effective way to help people in the company to progress in their professional careers and to gain broad knowledge of the company by building a relationship of confidence and respect between mentor and mentee.

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between mentor and mentee, who normally work in a similar area. Mentoring is a methodology that is independent of the hierarchical relationship and which accelerates the mentee’s learning and development. But mentoring is not training, and this is important. A mentor’s work consists of sharing their wisdom and experience, and not of training the mentee in technical knowledge. The mentor will help the mentee to learn by making exchanges, by asking and answering questions and sharing experiences. José Antonio Rocha Sánchez, director of Information Technologies Projects for Telefónica España, explains that, “I found the process of mentoring another professional a highly challenging experience because you are sharing different situations which you have previously experienced at some time of your professional life, so you can ask the mentee certain things so they can guide their own options and choose the best action for their interests. I also enjoyed the relationship of confidence established between mentor and mentee, which is fundamental for drawing conclusions and taking specific actions to enable the mentee to follow a work plan.”

Mentoring is not coaching either, for a coach prepares people to evolve and does not give advice on their professional careers or opportunities for development, nor helps them to form their internal network.

The mentor’s function is to transmit view and to advise the mentee in designing new perspectives for their development plans. The mentor helps the mentee to overcome organisational or technical obstacles by means of their networking and offers a safe, brave place for mentees to express their own learnings, difficulties or aspirations. The mentor seeks to push the mentee beyond their comfort area by supporting their development while proposing demanding targets without preventing their autonomous and responsible growth. They also share their own experiences and their knowledge of the company’s internal workings and corporate culture. From Telefónica España, the directress of multiline engineering and standard offers, Beatriz Herranz Casas, explains from her experience as a mentor that “you have to share knowledge and skills for if they are useful in the work of one area, they might be applicable in many others. We say that the culture of a company is formed by its capacities, its behaviours and its values, and all of these are in everyone who forms it and are available to the organisation.”

Author: GIMÉNEZ PLANO, Francisco

Title: The benefits of mentoring of business

Source: Capital Humano

Abstract: The article deals with the mentoring process and its benefits for the mentor, the mentee and also for the company. Witness accounts are also given from people who have taken part in mentoring processes developed in Spanish companies.

Descriptors: mentoring/development/benefits

The word “mentoring” comes from Greek mythology by which Odysseus (Ulysses in the Latin version of the name) entrusts his son’s education to his mentor friend. The aim of the Augere corporate people development programme is precisely to identify people with high potential and to design their development, and this area includes the mentoring programme.

What mentoring is and what it is not

Mentoring is a development tool of high potential people. It is an effective way to help people in the company to progress in their professional careers by building a relationship of confidence and respect

Mentoring process

A mentoring programme has different phases of development. Firstly, in the preparatory phase, the mentors and mentees are identified and associated following the established criteria. In the second phase, launch, the programme is presented to the whole of the organisation and is specifically reported to the project target group before it is developed. Mentors are given specific training on their role and on the tools available to them. In this sense, José Ignacio Pérez Alonso, customer attention manager for Telefónica España, also says that, “I am finding this process very useful for my work in the post and, above all, it is giving me very powerful tools for managing the people in my team. It has meant discovering a world of opportunities for working personal development.”

For mentees, in addition to having their role in the process clarified, two actions are posed: the first based on a series of sessions that contribute to gaining a greater view of the whole organisation and its business areas, and the second, taking advantage of the first, interaction and the building of a community among the members of the group of mentees. For Lluís Castells Arcas, director of Public Administrations and Enterprise Catalonia for Telefónica, the mentoring process “was a great experience as it made my learning process much easier by helping me to explore my desires, skills, motivations and objectives… and to define plans of action to carry them out.” According to María Dolores Martínez Bernabeu, Head of the Transformation Projects Area of Telefónica España, “my time in the mentoring process has been really useful. Our daily work absorbs us so much that we very rarely stop to reflect on ourselves. The meetings with your mentor are an excellent base for reflection, a chance to sit down to talk about oneself and one’s aspirations with a person who places all their experience and knowledge at your disposal; this helps you gain new perspectives, to enrich the way you think and to better develop your potential as a person and a professional.” Antonio Cazorla Ruiz, general manager of Large Customer Operations for Telefónica, points out that “my experience of mentoring is very positive, and in my opinion being a mentor is something essential for any manager. In my specific case, my mentor helped me to improve my perception of how others see me, how they perceive the way I decide and manage, and to be aware of many aspects of the interpersonal relationship of whose importance I had not been entirely aware until now. I am very happy with the experience and I hope to put everything I am learning into practice.”

A fourth phase consists of support and follow-up on the process by sessions of supervision and exchange of experiences between the mentors, and individualised support through coaching sessions. Finally a plan is developed for the project communication and image.

Benefits del mentoring

Mentoring offers benefits for both the mentor and the mentee, but also for the business. Mentoring helps other people acquire the form and behaviour of the company leadership style, and helps employees to take responsibility for their own professional development. The development of mentoring programmes enhances occupational satisfaction, commitment and loyalty. It also enables newcomers and people changing professional role to assume their responsibilities more rapidly. In this sense, Pedro Nevado Pena, Area Manager of Telefónica España, says that, “having the help and support of a person to guide you is a highly gratifying experience. This programme is a unique opportunity as it is not possible to learn everything by yourself and thanks to my mentor’s experience and his larger view of the company, I am able to accelerate my learning and professional development.”

between mentor and mentee, who normally work in a similar area. Mentoring is a methodology that is independent of the hierarchical relationship and which accelerates the mentee’s learning and development. But mentoring is not training, and this is important. A mentor’s work consists of sharing their wisdom and experience, and not of training the mentee in technical knowledge. The mentor will help the mentee to learn by making exchanges, by asking and answering questions and sharing experiences. José Antonio Rocha Sánchez, director of Information Technologies Projects for Telefónica España, explains that, “I found the process of mentoring another professional a highly challenging experience because you are sharing different situations which you have previously experienced at some time of your professional life, so you can ask the mentee certain things so they can guide their own options and choose the best action for their interests. I also enjoyed the relationship of confidence established between mentor and mentee, which is fundamental for drawing conclusions and taking specific actions to enable the mentee to follow a work plan.”

Mentoring is not coaching either, for a coach prepares people to evolve and does not give advice on their professional careers or opportunities for development, nor helps them to form their internal network.

The mentor’s function is to transmit view and to advise the mentee in designing new perspectives for their development plans. The mentor helps the mentee to overcome organisational or technical obstacles by means of their networking and offers a safe, brave place for mentees to express their own learnings, difficulties or aspirations. The mentor seeks to push the mentee beyond their comfort area by supporting their development while proposing demanding targets without preventing their autonomous and responsible growth. They also share their own experiences and their knowledge of the company’s internal workings and corporate culture. From Telefónica España, the directress of multiline engineering and standard offers, Beatriz Herranz Casas, explains from her experience as a mentor that “you have to share knowledge and skills for if they are useful in the work of one area, they might be applicable in many others. We say that the culture of a company is formed by its capacities, its behaviours and its values, and all of these are in everyone who forms it and are available to the organisation.” A

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ere Furthermore, Elena Ormaechea, head of Telefónica España, believes that, “one of the main advantages is that

the mentor shares the culture, the values and is perfectly aware of the dynamics of the organisation in all of its aspects, from the organisational to those that can affect the business or the management of the human resources. The most positive thing for me is that these experiences are real situations, the person has probably been through them and in any case they have had similar situations to allow them to give the mentee their point of view. It also allows you to see these situations from other viewpoints and to be advised on the approaches you might take. The area of confidence established between mentor and mentee is essential to be able to calmly share all aspects on which the mentee would like to develop.” Antonio Oriol Barat, Infrastructure Marketing Manager for Telefónica España, thinks that, “participation as a mentor in the mentoring programme is a double challenge and a satisfaction. A first challenge because it is necessary to put skills into practice that we do not always use in our daily management of people (although we should), such as active listening, empathy, coaching, etc. It is a satisfaction because you are able to have sincere, interesting conversations with some of the people of greatest potential in our organisation. Giving these people value simply with your experience and your suggestions is, once more, a challenge.”

What’s more, mentoring increases effective communication, the management of knowledge and the company talent in strategic projects and allows the future backups of the company management to be identified. Mónica Agüera, project management directress for Sanofi, believes that, “the mentoring sessions with a senior professional with a functional profile complementary to mine allowed me to gain a global view of the business, which has helped me in doing my duties. From the point of view of personal development, my mentor helped me to understand the impact of my image on the organisation and to deal with conflicts by expanding the focus perspective of the different subjects.”

According to Wharton, one of the largest and most prestigious business schools of the University of Pennsylvania, most Fortune 500 companies believe that mentoring is an important tool for employee development; 71% of these companies have mentoring programmes. “Knowledge exchanges increase, something very important in companies where research and development are the pillars of growth”, says Terri A. Scandura, teacher of Management and Dean of the Miami University Graduate School.

Since the 1980s, several academic studies have shown the different benefits of mentoring. “Employees who have mentors clearly earn more money, are better socialised inside the organisation and are more productive”, says Scandura. “They suffer less from stress and are promoted more rapidly. Thanks to the positive benefits of the mentors, companies are still very interested in this process”.

In Microsoft, mentoring “forms a part” of the corporate philosophy. “We have set up a 70/20/10 model (in learning)”, says Jorge Calviño, Director of Talent Management for Microsoft Ibérica. The 20% refers to coaching and mentoring activities. Another example is Sun Microsystems, which in 2006 published the results of a study that concluded that “mentoring had a positive impact on mentors and mentees, and produced employees that were far more valuable for the business”. According to this study, the retention rates were far higher among mentees (72%) and mentors (69%) than among employees not taking part in the mentoring programme (49%).

Many companies have already invested in or are currently investing in mentoring programmes, which in different kinds of companies bring benefits for those involved and above all for the business itself.

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