Mentoring is a tool that may be used in small businesses as well as large Fortune 500 companies with multiple ways to plan according to the type of results a company is working towards. Through looking into the overall results of individual companies it can be seen that mentoring brings positive results for both peer to peer and management mentoring.
Creating Mentorships for Success In order to have a strong mentoring program goals must be established to provide a strong foundation for the program to be successful. When faced with employees that were unsatisfied with current mentoring, Enterprise Holdings decided to look to management mentors to find the existing opportunities for mentoring programs. Enterprise needed to shift away from coaching and develop goals that were directed towards mentoring. They then found four goals that could help the program that include: leadership development, increasing diversity in management, improving retention, and increasing the employee satisfaction, (Corporate Mentoring). Enterprise had chosen to work with a design team and go for an electronic based management mentoring program, due to the large size of the company, which was aimed at meeting the strategic goals. The retention after twelve months has shown with 450 pairs a retention of over 89 percent has been established, (Corporate Mentoring).
Choosing Where to Mentor With most mentoring taking place with peer-to-peer or with a senior employee mentoring lower level Cisco had chosen to try reverse mentoring with senior employees as the mentees and junior employees as the mentors. Through feedback after the program the mentors provided areas in which mentoring was most beneficial. The most popular area for mentoring was in communication and style to help develop how the senior employees communicated with their teams and the effectiveness. This lead to the junior employees providing feedback as to how the senior members could improve communication skills. In communicating through the reverse mentoring senior employees were able to express a need to connect with new teams due to large amounts of change through Cisco. The junior employees were able to give fresh perspectives to the senior employees on how to engage the new team members, (Earle, 2011). Through using the reverse method of mentoring Cisco employees had a chance to communicate honestly about their ideas to help open communication and build stronger teams.
Why Choose Mentoring Within the Industrial Society a survey was conducted that included over 300 companies to show how beneficial mentoring had been to their companies. Out of the companies chosen to participate 80 percent had noticed improvement towards the individual goals within the company, (Hennigan, 2003). The survey was effective in finding out the top reasons for choosing to use mentoring programs. The top reason for choosing to mentor was for the retention of valued employees, in which 73 percent agreed upon, (Hennigan, 2003). Secondly, 71 percent had chosen the improvement of employee leadership as well as managerial skills for reasoning behind choosing mentoring, (Hennigan, 2003). The third top reason chosen to mentor was because of the ability to develop new leaders, in which 66 percent agreed, (Hennigan, 2003).
Turning to Peers
When Microsoft was in need of individuals to fill 300 senior management positions they turned to mentoring to help fill the positions. The new senior employees had the opportunity to be paired with Microsoft veteran mentors that had similar experience, (Rouen, 2012). Through offering an opportunity to mentor with an individual that may be in a different field but with the same experience it helped to show different paths that could be taken if not chosen for a particular job. Through having peer-to-peer experience levels can help the employees develop new skills and to keep them engaged within the company, (Rouen, 2012). With the success of the program