Everyone Needs a Mentor

Overview

I have been lucky enough to have had a number of mentors over the years, although it is only in recent decades that I have fully recognised and appreciated the role that some of these people played. I have also been fortunate to have been mentor to a wide range of people from different backgrounds and age groups. I am grateful for the learning I have received from them and for the feeling of privilege in helping them achieve goals very different from my own.

‘Gratitude', ‘learning'and ‘privilege'are three terms we hear frequently, when people talk about their experiences as mentor or mentee. The need to learn and the need to help others to learn are deep-seated emotional drives within most people. These drives were a part of human evolution. It seems that a distinguishing feature between homo sapiens sapiens (us) and other species of great ape is the instinct on the one hand to pass on abstract learning or wisdom, and on the other to receive it. Our liking for story and anecdote - which are closely associated with depth and quality of learning - is no accident. As accumulated wisdom was passed from one generation to another, it expanded the range of human ability and opened up an ever-increasing gulf between humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom.

That instinct is a double-edged sword, however. It often occurs that the desire of the more experienced person (especially if he or she is much older) to pass on accumulated wisdom exceeds greatly the desire of the less experienced person to listen. Most people may have the instinct to be a mentor, but to do the role well requires a capacity to hold back and allow people to learn for themselves.

From reading much of the early literature on mentoring it would be easy to conclude that the mentor is someone who gives wise advice - indeed, that is one of the common dictionary definitions. In practice, mentors provide a spectrum of learning and supporting behaviours, from challenging and being a critical friend to being a role model, from helping to build networks and develop personal resourcefulness to simply being there to listen, from helping people work out what they want to achieve, and why, to planning how they will bring change about. A mentor may also be a conscience, a friend and - in certain definitions - a godfather or sponsor.

It is the holistic nature of the mentoring role that distinguishes it from other learning or supporting roles, such as coaching or counselling. We explore the differences in detail in

Chapter 2, but suffice for now to say that although mentoring shares behaviours with some styles of coaching and some styles of counselling, the overlap of roles is only partial. A number of sports now provide top athletes with a mentor as well as a coach. Whereas the coach concentrates on technique and motivation, the mentor provides a very different kind of support - one based on reflective learning and something akin to pastoral care.

A key capability of the effective mentor is being able to adapt to a much wider range of behaviours.

There is also a remarkable width to the range of applications for mentoring. Examples of mentoring programmes in recent years include:

• The International Labour Organisation uses mentoring to help its young professionals (typically highly qualified people in their mid- to late twenties) become acclimatised to the organisation in their first year. After their induction year, they are normally assigned to the field. They find it can be very important to have a trusted confidant(e) back at headquarters.

• The Public Sector Leaders Scheme is a development programme run by the Cabinet Office to support senior Civil Servants in growing their leadership skills. Every participant in the course has the opportunity to be mentored. Participants can choose to have a mentor for the duration of the scheme and beyond. The Secretariat has a pool of mentors from senior levels in the public sector. PSLS participants can select their own mentor from a choice of three (from a pool selected by the Secretariat), introduce a current mentor to PSLS, or continue to work with their current mentor if they have one.

• Ericsson, the Swedish mobile telephone company, uses a global mentoring programme aimed at international high-flyers, helping them to become comfortable in a global culture.

• BOOST is an innovative project in Zimbabwe to help the brightest, most entrepreneurial graduates set up their own businesses, which in turn hire other graduates. Against a background of political turmoil and very high unemployment among graduates, the scheme has received considerable backing at home and abroad. The mentors are all successful businesspeople from the local economy.

• British Aerospace, which recruits some 400 graduates annually, aims to give each of them a mentor for at least the first year.

• The Cabinet Office manages a programme for unleashing the potential of people with severe disability. It pairs the disabled person with a more senior Civil Servant, who can help him or her think constructively about issues of career management and personal development.

• A major London solicitor's practice uses mentoring to help people make the transition to partner. What it takes to be considered partner material is so difficult to explain or demonstrate that formal training does not really help.

  Mentoring provides a useful way of passing on this largely intuitive understanding.

• For Shell in Brunei and elsewhere, a major challenge is how to speed up the development of local nationals to take over from the expatriate engineers and managers. Mentoring provides a practical and culturally acceptable route towards making this happen.

• The World Bank attracts the best and brightest people from around the world, making it a hothouse of ideas and potential cultural conflict. From a handful of relationships two years ago, mentoring has spread to some 2, 000 pairs, in a variety of schemes, each either providing a support network for a particular ethnic or functional group, or building bridges between them.

• Birmingham's BEAT scheme, which addressed the special needs of young people leaving prison, placed most of its youngsters into work and kept them out of court. In addition, some of the mentors were long-term unemployed people who gained so much self-confidence helping the young offenders into employment that they, too, returned to full-time work.

• FAS, the Irish Ministry of Employment, is helping thousands of difficult-to-employ young people - many of them from families with no history of stable employment for generations - to acquire self-confidence and skills with a combination of FAS-delivered training, coaching from colleagues in their work placement and mentoring from a senior manager in the placement company.

• Mentors help musically talented young people stick to it through the difficult teenage years when other attractions tug at their attention.

• There are now a number of programmes where volunteers from local companies or from the community in general spend time helping children with poor literacy and numeracy skills to catch up. (There is some debate about whether this is really mentoring, even where there is an additional role of helping the young person think about life goals, but we'll avoid that for now. )

• Black students at risk of dropping out of university may have a mentor for the first year to help them settle in.

• Some schools now provide each newcomer with a peer mentor from two years above to help him or her settle in. The arrangement also helps build theself-respect and maturity of the young mentor. Another group increasingly targeted within schools as potential mentees is children at risk from bullying.

Crime Concern has used mentoring to target young people at risk. Similar programmes in the United States show that having an adult to share concerns with and be a positive role model has a major positive effect upon absenteeism, violent behaviour, drug abuse and the young person's relationships in general. Other schemes offering similar support include 100 Black Men, where the mentors are drawn from the same ethnic group as the young people at risk.

Mentoring schemes targeted at legitimate refugees (who have been given permission to remain in the UK) have helped these people and their families settle in to their new lives more rapidly and with greater confidence.

The notion that everyone needs a mentor is not so far from the truth. At key times in our lives, having a mentor can make a substantial difference to the choices we make, how confident we feel in making them, and how likely we are to achieve what we want.