Case Study: The Case Of Mentoring Management, Pg 2

CASE STUDY
The Case Of Mentoring Management
Continued..

THE DISCUSSION

TOJO JOSE
CEO, hrfolks.com

Mentoring is a unique organisational process. It is as unique as some of the other hrd interventions initiated by Prasad and Kulkarni at Litmus to reduce the attrition-rate. Thus, like the employee stock option plans, employee training, and the employee satisfaction survey, mentoring is a serious technique. It demands considerable preparation and groundwork. A formal approach alone will force individuals and organisations to give mentoring the commitment it deserves.

The role and the responsibility of each participant--the mentor, the mentee, the functional head, and the management development cell of the HRD department--must be articulated. The allocation of time and resources must be done in advance. The process must be broken down into sub-units, and the ownership of each sub-process must be fixed. The goals of the initiative must be identified so that its progress towards them can be monitored and measured. Most significantly, mentoring needs to be marketed to secure internal buy-in. All this takes time. It is only then that the programme should be officially rolled out.

Since there has not been an official roll-out of mentoring at Litmus, the crucial question is whether it has succeeded. The answer depends on what the goals of the initiative were. If the objective was to reduce the attrition-rate and to provide employees with a punching bag-like outlet, mentoring has worked. But these are short-term benefits. They will not endure unless the process is institutionalised. It is noteworthy that few employees at Litmus--with the exception of the people who initiated it--are aware of the raison d'être of mentoring. The biggest risk to the success of the programme comes from this.

The need to institutionalise it is, therefore, all the more critical because mentoring, by its very nature, is a voluntary activity. Without clear guidelines, people will lose their way, and the initiative is likely to lose steam, sooner or later. In the light of what has happened at Litmus over the last two years of mentoring, I would suggest:

RE-STATE THE OBJECTIVES. Prasad should play an active role in reiterating the objectives of mentoring. What is the mentoring scheme for? Who is it aimed at? What is the tenure of the scheme? What are the ground-rules? What is the basis of choosing the mentor and the mentee? These are all questions to which Litmus must find answers.

Time-frames should be agreed upon and a consensus arrived at on issues like the duration of the mentoring scheme, the number of times the mentor should meet his mentee in a year, the areas of focus at the meetings, and the scope of the mentoring programme in terms of what issues mentors have control over, and what they do not.

BUILD PROCESS OWNERSHIP. All change-management programmes need a messiah. This person should believe passionately in mentoring, and be able to communicate its benefits to the other employees in the organisation. Litmus should vest the ownership of mentoring in a senior executive. This person should work through ownership-building workshops to neutralise the possible resistance and fears, and project the benefits of mentoring.

GIVE IT AN AURA. A certain amount of hype and hoopla is a must. The selection of an employee as a mentor or a mentee should be seen as a recognition of merit in itself. Mentors should also believe that their role is essential for building an effective succession-plan. And, since one component of a mentor's selection-process is performance, they should be urged to share their success-stories with their mentee. This will provide the latter with role-models, whose achievements they can strive to emulate.

SET PERFORMANCE TARGETS. The success of mentoring depends on whether it lends itself to process-improvements and evaluation. Since the objectives are clearly articulated, its evaluation can be done against the started objectives. At Litmus, one of the core purposes of the scheme was the retention of employees, especially of the Double hp fast-trackers. A more meaningful measure could be the number of leaders Prasad expects to create from among the trainees in the next 10 years. Such an approach will ensure that mentoring becomes an extension of Litmus' other hr initiatives.

SURESH OGALE
Head (Resources & Planning), Leading Edge

Mentoring is one of the several hr-related initiatives that have been undertaken at Litmus to bring down its attrition-rate. It is a good initiative per se. But, in their single-minded pursuit of the goal, Prasad and his team must not lose sight of the broader repertoire of soft skills that Litmus needs to nurture as an organisation. In addition to technical excellence, the success of a software firm depends on its ability to actively listen to its employees, adapt to shifting environmental trends, and build trust in the mind of its customers, both internal and external.

Mentoring must factor in these requirements. In fact, having traversed some distance with its home-spun mentoring initiative, it is now time for Litmus to re-define the role of mentoring, and identify a road-map that will ensure the incorporation of these soft skills. Recent research on emotional intelligence proves that factors such as self-awareness, self-control, commitment, and integrity not only create successful employees, but also successful companies. Skills that contribute to emotional intelligence can be taught. Indeed, training people in soft skills is one of the components in the larger process of organisational-development. This process begins with an understanding of why companies need to focus on emotional intelligence, and ends with the company's managers signalling their commitment to the initiatives of coaching, and mentoring.

Litmus must focus on the broader components of the mentoring process in terms of 3 factors: the competencies required for a job, how these competencies develop over time, and how they work together. One thing Prasad should do is to lay down a list of do's and dont's as part of the ground-rules. This is imperative for the mentors. For instance, the list of do's for the mentor includes:

Most programmes falter because mentees expect mentors to be able to solve their work and non-work problems. Or mentors believe their responsibility extends to helping the mentee, irrespective of the nature or the context of the problem. Instead, open up alternative scenarios so that the mentee is able to think through the implications of her decision, and evaluate the outcomes on her own. The responsibility for a particular course of action rests with the mentee; it cannot be passed on to the mentor.

Review the career-options open to the mentee regularly. This has to be consistent, of course, with her aptitude. This is an untested area at Litmus. Working in projects is not the only high-profile route to career-advancement; marketing, customer relations, and TQM are some of the many equally-challenging avenues.

Identify actions that will facilitate personal- and professional-development. Do not lose sight of the fact that mentoring is, essentially, a developmental tool that encourages individuals to work to their potential.

Be an active listener. Give advice on general issues of concern, including personal matters, if the mentee so chooses.

There are also a few things that companies should avoid:

Do not get involved in performance-evaluations of the mentee at any stage.

Do not be part of any decisions on granting salary-hikes, increments, and bonuses to the mentee.

Do not disclose anything that is said in trust. Confidentiality is the key to ensuring a productive mentor-mentee relationship.

As far as the measures for monitoring the success of such an initiative are concerned, Litmus should have no problem. Such measures are available in the People Capability Maturity Model (PCMM), and can be suitably modified.

MEASUREMENT ONE: To determine the status of mentoring activities, measure the:

Number of mentoring relationships established in the company.
Rate at which senior employees apply to become mentors.
Efficiency with which these new mentoring relationships are established.
Frequency with which mentors and mentees interact.
Number of problems identified and improvements made in mentoring-relationships.

MEASUREMENT TWO: To determine the value of mentoring activities, measure:

Growth of core competencies in individuals or groups being mentored.
Ability of individuals or groups to use the resources of the organisation.
Performance of individuals or groups.
Career-development of individuals.
Alignment of individual-, group-, and team-motivation along with the objectives of the organisation.

ARUN JOSHI
Group President (HRD), RPG Enterprise

Litmus has taken the right step, but for the wrong reason. Mentoring cannot be used as a tool with which to reduce the rate of employee-attrition. That is only a happy by-product. Mentoring is basically a development-oriented initiative. It facilitates an environment in which an individual grows, both as a person and as a professional. Its purpose is to make the mentee feel comfortable in the organisation and, more importantly, feel wanted. The signal it sends out is unambiguous: you are important to the future of the organisation.

Organisations deploy mentoring because it generates a feel-good factor within the company. And, given the business context at Litmus--where the timely completion of projects is critical--and the unidimensional profile of the company's employees, it is important to generate the feel-good factor. If, as a result, the retention rate improves, it is just as well. But this is only incidental.

True, it is important for all management initiatives to flow from the larger vision of the company, but Prasad and his team would do well to realise that mentoring operates in the realm of the intangible, and does not readily lend itself to parameters which are either instantly measurable, or directly impact on its business results. Clearly, retention can be used as an indicator of the success of mentoring. But it isn't the only indicator of it.

This raises 3 important questions. Since you can monitor only that which you can measure, how do you measure the success of a mentoring initiative? Ask the mentee. It is simple. It is direct.The level of satisfaction as articulated by him is a clear indicator of whether the programme is working. Of course, there are other measures: the pace of development of a mentee, or her level of satisfaction at being a Litmus employee.

Second, whom do you target for mentoring? Prasad may have his reasons for limiting it to the Double hp category, but my feeling is that it should be targeted at all fresh entrants to Litmus. They come without any mental baggage, and it is easier to mould them. Since culture cannot be taught in a classroom, it is best to assign the trainee to a mentor who not only knows the pulse of the organisation, but symbolises the best of what the company stands for.

Finally, how long should the initiative last? It should last only for the duration of the formal training-programme, normally a year. Although terminated, the relationships--as invariably happens--could well continue beyond that. But the company should officially withdraw at this stage to allow itself the slack to deal with a fresh batch of mentees.

The issue about whether there should be a formal or informal approach to mentoring is a non-issue. Mentoring should be informal.The road-map which Litmus has chosen is just what I would choose. Learning from mistakes is more enriching than installing a pre-tested package. The advantage of an informal system is that mentors participate voluntarily. A formal system forces them into something which may not always lead to positive results. The disadvantage of an informal approach is that it may lack credibility.

However, since mentoring is a growth-oriented initiative, credibility comes from the mentor's response to information from the mentee. Therefore, the mentor should be senior enough to influence the organisation's policies in tune with the feedback he gets. Of course, his skill lies in converting a problem that is individual-specific to a generic problem that is organisation-centric. This means that he brings to the surface concerns from the innards of the organisation without raking up names. Such skill is a direct outcome of attributes like respecting confidentiality--the hallmark of an ideal mentor-mentee relationship. In effect, a relentless focus on the initiative will ensure that the supporting-structures automatically fall into place over time--even if you do not go about it formally.

NEETA MOHLA
Director, TMI India

Prasad and his team have every reason to be concerned about the attrition-rate because, in the ultimate analysis, it is only intangible assets like technical and managerial talent which create value for companies like Litmus. Mentoring is certainly a right step in that direction. It handles emotive issues like the need to "let off steam" while other initiatives--like the employee stock options plan--take care of the tangible requirements.

In a change-driven environment, both employees and companies are required to balance innovation, change, and stability. The problems arising from the "world of emotions" cause greater barriers to personal and organisational growth than the concrete problems that come from the "world of facts." Issues related to co-operation, motivation, and trust, for instance, are more difficult to deal with than technical, marketing, or professional problems, which can be dealt with by rational methods.

Mentoring has several benefits. It provides the emotional reassurance to mentees that they are being cared for. It facilitates career-advancement by aligning individual strengths with organisational needs. It fosters an open environment, in which problems are allowed to surface and are dealt with in a spirit of understanding. More importantly, it allows the vision, the culture, and the values of the organisation to pervade it. I think it is important for Prasad and his team to convert these objectives into key success-factors.

This is necessary in the light of the fact that employee-retention is a major concern for Litmus, and the Double hp category, in particular, is characterised by a high attrition-rate. The emotional conflicts of the Double HPS can be resolved through a process of counselling. For instance, Double HPS may have concerns about their work-life balance. Litmus could look into this, and link rewards and recognition to create such a balance.

Kulkarni has done well by not outsourcing mentoring. Mentors need, to invariably, be from within the organisation. But there are certain issues he should act on:

Confidentiality is an absolute given between the mentor and the mentee. To create a relationship where the mentor is effective, he or she must be perceived as trustworthy.

The expectation of the relationship must be clearly defined. Problems occur if the mentee expects too much from the mentor, or when the differentiation between official, professional, or personal problems is not clarified. A mentor is not a life-saver: he is not supposed to resolve all the problems of the mentee.

The process of selecting a mentor should be modified. It is important for the organisation to select mentors capable of playing the role of facilitator, coach, and counsel at the same time.

Litmus should have a process to develop mentors from being mere supervisors to being coaches. This is imperative because the company's mentors are not adequately trained in the process of mentoring.

Litmus should build an organisational climate which facilitates mentoring, and recognises those mentors who contribute to the development of the mentees.

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