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When asked to describe the mentorship program at Towers Perrin, Anne Bodnar, manager of human resources, points out there isn't just one employee development program at the Stamford, Conn.-based firm. There are three.
First, she says, midlevel and above new hires have a formal onboarding program that lasts from six to 12 weeks and allows them to meet with the necessarily people and familiarize themselves with the client work they need to be proficient in.
From there, the ownership of the mentoring programs is really in the hands of the individual offices. "They've taken mentoring and applied it to the nature of the business mix they've got and the personality of the office. So we have a whole series of different mentoring programs going on. Some of them are based on the business; some of them are based on an extension of orientation." She says, for example, in the Boston office there are mentoring circles instead of a one-on-one setup. "We support [each program] from an HR point of view, but it's very much owned by the local leadership team."
No 'Mentors' HereIndividualized employee development takes a wholly different form at Chicago-based West Monroe Partners. "We don't actually use the term mentor here," says Susan Stelter, West Monroe Partners' head of quality assurance. "The thought being that mentors are really someone you aspire to be. And so that's a choice you make and a request you make of someone to kind of create a formal mentorship." At West Monroe, new employees will meet with their coaches on their first day. Then it's a monthly meeting with that coach, who will be at least one level above the new hire, during that six-month tenure. "The coach is really meant to help ease the transition," Stelter says. However, if the new hire is part of a campus recruitment effort, he or she will be assigned to their coach long before they ever walk in the door of the Chicago-based firm. From January until their July start date, the coaches, who are each assigned between one and three employees, keep new employees in the loop and invite them to corporate events. Each employee at West Monroe also has a performance manager, "someone who acts as your advocate, who ensures your performance is staying on par, who will meet with you on a quarterly basis formally as well as conducts your annual review at year end," McKissic says. Coaches and performance managers each have specific agendas for the employees they work with at West Monroe. But what if someone needs another resource on a more personal development level? "We encourage everyone to identify someone as a personal mentor. But again, we view that as a personal choice; we don't like to do those as assignments," Stelter says. "We look at mentors as people who both have something about them that attracts you both personally and professionally and you can talk to them outside of the work mode and share things with them that might be more personal that you wouldn't necessarily do in a work situation." —J.D. |
Finally, senior leaders are encouraged to take junior consultants under their wing. "The principals really take their jobs seriously as developing future leaders. It's really an active part of their commitment to workplace leadership here."
Whether someone takes on a mentoring role also is reflected in his or her annual review. "Our performance evaluation system includes an assessment of someone's contribution to workplace leadership, and mentoring would clearly fit into that," Bodnar says.
Such an investment in development has an effect on employee morale—and the bottom line. "I can tell you we've made a difference in terms of the employee engagement, and as we know, it drives client satisfaction and success."
Help: A Phone Call Away
While Towers Perrin has multiple programs, Alexandria, Va.-based Robbins-Gioia has multiple subject matter experts (SMEs) on hand, who serve as the firm's mentors. These employees, who have completed a leadership program and a subsequent skills assessment, aid in the development of each and every employee. For example, you may want to ask your mentor about budgets one month and work-life balance the next. At Robbins-Gioia, there's a mentor designed to handle each of those topics.
This is a vast improvement over the old setup, says Jennifer Stanford, director of the workforce performance group at the firm. It used to be "you were assigned a mentor typically in your same area, perhaps near your same place of work for example, and it wasn't necessarily matched up to skills. In the last couple of years, we really developed our leadership program, which was the springboard for our other mentoring programs."
A rotating staff of 25 SMEs ensures employees are assisted quickly. "Within 24 hours, people are getting the answers they need," Stanford says.
But more than that, the program increased the human capital of the company as a whole. "It really stimulated our knowledge management process within the company and it helped spread out information. Instead of having the two or three go-to people everybody in the company knows, and overloading those people, it became a growth opportunity for these people in the company to take on a mentoring role."
That strategy also is one that engages older employees, says Paula Pierce, principal consulting manager, Strategic Human Capital Management, "who maybe are very senior in a company and maybe reached the top of their career ladder. It's an opportunity for them to continue to grow and be challenged in absence of [that continuing] to climb higher on the career ladder."
Development: A Team Effort
Other firms have a hybrid program whereby they encourage employees to seek out their own mentors, but assign them one initially. This is the case at Boston-based Bain & Company.
A Checklist for Finding That Perfect MentorIf your company doesn't have a formal mentoring program—or even if it does—it can be hard to find someone who you trust to guide you on your career path. "To me there are two things that this person should look for. One is someone they respect and in a certain way they view as a role model and two, someone who inspires trust—who will not be misusing their information," says Teresa Martin-Retortillo of Bain & Company. But how do you narrow that down? "First of all, you might look for someone a few years ahead of you and is on a project," adds Anne Bodnar of Towers Perrin. "You might look for someone who went to the same undergraduate school you did whom you could network with. You could look for someone who joined [the firm] the same time you did, and they might have some ideas. I think the other thing you do is you ask your peers because sometimes they'll say, 'Oh you know I had the best conversation and lunch with so-and-so, and I just found them really helpful." Tamra Chandler of Hitachi Consulting says that when her company polled mentees in the spring to find out what they most wanted out of a mentoring relationship, employees gave the following answers, which are listed by popularity of priority:
Bodnar says it's important that employees looking for a mentor be proactive. "I think they need to take some ownership of their personal development so you want to encourage them to just knock on a door. I've got to tell you; I think 99 percent of the people whose door you'd knock on would say, 'I'd love to.' I can't think of a person I've worked with in 25, 30 years who wouldn't say, "Absolutely, I'll spend some time with you.'" Chandler says it's important to understand the benefit of a good mentor. "I think a good mentor isn't necessarily that person who's trying to help you find that next job. They're the person who's trying to help you be better at what you do every day." —J.D. |
"Obviously when you join the company, it's not evident who you're going to get along with and who you might be inspired by, and therefore certain offices choose to basically assign a mentor for the first year of their career at Bain.
And that tends to work for the first year or two," says Teresa Martin-Retortillo, a partner and private equity expert, who works in Bain's Madrid office. Martin-Retortillo is responsible for mentoring women at the Madrid office and ensuring employee development within private equity.
"Once you get to know the team you're going to be working with and once you get to know more senior people in the firm, you can very informally—and it's very standard to—have conversations with people you want to have as mentors," Martin-Retortillo says. "In the end, there's always the natural mentor."
Martin-Retortillo says the firm works hard to match employees well, but the choice, she says, is ultimately up to the mentee. "And frankly in this office, and I believe this is true for many other European offices, there is a natural period for changing mentors.
So without having to provide any explanation, once a year, people can review who their mentor is. The mentee, who clearly is the important person here, can change mentors with no questions asked."
And at Bain, how a mentee does reflects back on the mentor. "It is something that we place a strong emphasis on when we review people for more senior level positions, to see how well they actually coached and mentored people. [We] almost measure your success by the success of your mentees."
Hitachi Consulting practices a similar process. At the Dallas-based firm, new employees are assigned a career adviser who is involved with their review process and workflow. That structure, however, does not apply to the mentoring program, says Tamra Chandler, managing vice president for global solutions and people. "We really want it to be driven by our people and what they want."
For example, Chandler says, in the Pacific Northwest offices, employees are assigned a buddy who "shows them where the bathroom is and answers all those silly questions, but is not ever intended to be the long-term mentor." From there, employees are encouraged to find a mentor on their own.
However, the human resources department supports the program's success. "Mostly we see our role as advocating and promoting mentoring so that people truly are taking it upon themselves to drive it." To that end, the firm has "Mentor Love Week" to coincide with Valentine's Day. "We encourage our mentees to thank [their mentors] for the support they've had or take them to lunch or send them an e-card or just do something kind of fun," Chandler says.
Top-down endorsements strengthen the program. "Historically we've had mentoring awards where we recognize people who are our best mentors, and those are essentially nominations that are put forward by the mentees themselves."
And that's all the more reason why mentors make time for their mentees. "Even if our folks are traveling, we try to stick to a four-day schedule, so Fridays are very much kind of an office day. So they'll plan on having lunch or happy hour or something that gives them a chance to connect."
Regardless of how a firm's program is setup, each has the same goal: helping employees reach their full potential. "I honestly see that as being a distinctive aspect of leading consulting firms," Towers Perrin's Bodnar says. "They really do know how to develop staff, and they know it isn't just [through] formal training programs."
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