Everyone Needs a Mentor

Overview

When I first wrote Everyone Needs a Mentor, the concept of using mentoring as a vehicle for promoting equal opportunity was still fairly new. The handful of programmes there were tended to focus on high-potential women. Since then, several evolutions have occurred. One is that mentoring for equal opportunity at work now addresses a wide range of target groups, from women at all levels and career stages, through ethnic minorities, to the mentally and physically disabled. The other is that the concept of equal opportunity has to a significant extent been overtaken by diversity management. Where equal opportunity attempts to redress the power-balance in the workplace in favour of previously disadvantaged groups, diversity management takes the more positivist view that organisations should be making the maximum use of the diversity of cultures, skills, genders and personalities within them.

These two views, which are not necessarily incompatible, tend to inform how companies design their mentoring programmes. For many, the most practical approach is a programme aimed specifically at a clearly defined group. Aer Rianta, the Irish Airports Authority, achieved significant results over a number of years with a programme to link women in junior and middle management with male executives (there were no female executives at the time). An Post, the Irish Post Office, recently embarked on a similar scheme, but using mentors drawn from key customers and suppliers. The problems with such an approach, however, include:

• There is the possibility that many potential participants do not want to be labelled in this way, as BP Engineering found when it consulted a cross-section of its female employees. Rather, they wanted to be encouraged to join a wider scheme, open to all, which would not carry the stigma of disadvantage.

• There is the difficulty of defining just who is disadvantaged (is a black female with an Oxbridge education more disadvantaged than a white male with a poor education and from a lower-class background?) and who belongs to a group. One North American company was embarrassed when homosexual employees complained that the women's leadership programme disadvantaged them, so the company formed another scheme, only to find that other groups, such as the physically disabled, also wanted the same privileges. Confused by a plethora of schemes, potential mentors backed away in droves. The company attempted to place all the disadvantaged groups into one scheme, but some groups did not want to be categorised alongside others they considered different. The process collapsed under the weight of bureaucracy and now anyone, from any group, including the most positively advantaged, can apply for a mentor.

• How valid are the assumptions about behavioural change? For example, a gender-based glass ceiling programme defined its mentoring element in terms of helping women understand how to think and behave at a more senior level. Some of the women challenged this definition and asked for an analysis of what behaviours they needed to acquire. It soon became clear that cloning male executives might not meet the programme goal because a high proportion of the male executives did not exemplify these behaviours either. Indeed, in many cases the female mentees were better exemplars of those behaviours than their intended mentors. Redefining the programme to legitimise building on the strengths the women had, rather than to change them into something else, gave a stronger sense of commitment and purpose.

Mentoring aimed to support diversity management overcomes most of these problems, but it makes it much more difficult to target mentoring on people who will particularly benefit from it. Companies taking this approach tend to develop practical methods to encourage people to come forward - for example, by making mentoring an option to be considered at each performance appraisal.