What mentoring is
Mentoring (الإرشاد المهني), also called mentorship, is a lasting relationship in which a more experienced employee guides the career path and the professional judgement of a less experienced employee, through repeated meetings over a period of months. It does not work through a single session, or through a course that is over once it has been delivered.
What a mentor actually passes on in mentoring
- Reading situations. How a situation is assessed before a decision is taken on it.
- Judging alternatives. Why one course is chosen and another is set aside, even when the other looks the more obvious choice.
- The unwritten knowledge of the profession. What is learnt through practice and does not appear in any procedure, checklist or other job aid.
- Reading the career path. What opens the way to the next role, and what holds that move back.
- A network of contacts. Introducing the mentee to the people whom it would help them to know.
What these five have in common is that they are a person’s knowledge, not prepared content. They cannot be written up in advance and handed over as material; they sit in the experience of the mentor. That is why holding a position is not, on its own, enough to make someone suitable for mentoring. Mentoring calls for a person whose experience can be explained.
How mentoring differs from coaching
Mentoring and coaching (التدريب الإداري) are both a repeated one to one conversation aimed at developing the employee, and they can be confused because the effect visible from outside looks similar. They differ in four respects:
- The subject. Mentoring deals with the career path and with professional judgement over the long term. Coaching deals with a specific performance goal within a limited period.
- The source of value. A mentor offers their own experience, and so does more of the talking than the asking. A coach works through questions, and need not have held the role of the person being coached.
- The duration. A mentoring relationship is relatively open ended and is reviewed at intervals. A coaching engagement has a known number of sessions and an end point.
- The outcome. Mentoring is not measured against a single goal that is then closed. Coaching is measured by whether the goal that both parties agreed at the outset has been reached.
The two arrangements do not compete. An employee can have a mentor for years and a coach for three months at the same time, with each relationship dealing with a different subject.
Why the mentor in mentoring is not the line manager
The line manager makes decisions on the employee’s appraisal and promotion. Whatever the employee says to the line manager therefore passes through a calculation of the effect it may have on those decisions. Mentoring needs room for the mentee to say “I don’t know” and “I got that wrong” at no cost, and that room is hard to keep inside a supervisory relationship. For that reason a mentoring arrangement can be set up across another line in the organisational structure, or with a person in a neighbouring department.
The same reasoning underlies reverse mentoring (الإرشاد العكسي), although there the direction in which knowledge flows is turned around. In both cases the arrangement depends on the conversation being kept apart from the decisions that are made about the person speaking.
What makes a mentoring arrangement work
- A written purpose at the start. It states what the mentee wants to come away with, even if in a single sentence.
- A fixed rhythm. It replaces meetings called when the need arises, because a need does not announce itself at the right moment.
- Choice by both parties. It matters because mentors assigned administratively produce appointments in a diary, not a relationship.
- A declared boundary of confidentiality. It makes clear that what is said in a meeting does not pass into the appraisal process.
- A review point. It comes after a set number of meetings, and at that point ending the arrangement is acceptable without the ending being taken as a failure.
What empties mentoring of its meaning
One error is to launch a mentoring programme with a list of names and a timetable of meetings, and then to measure it by the number of meetings that took place. Attendance becomes the outcome, and the question of what has changed is left without an answer. A count of meetings shows that the mentor and the mentee met; it does not show what passed between them. The measure closer to the meaning of mentoring falls on the mentee: what can the mentee now do that they could not do before?
A second error is to tie mentoring to the promotion decision. Once a mentor becomes a route to the next role, the arrangement turns into a channel of influence, and it attracts people looking for advancement rather than people looking to learn.
Where mentoring sits among other development tools
Mentoring addresses what needs time and judgement, while other development tools are quicker and narrower. Job shadowing (الظل الوظيفي) answers a single question about one particular job, on one short occasion. Career pathing (رسم المسار المهني) sets out the roles that are possible for an employee and what each of them requires. Mentoring is what helps the employee to move along that path once they know it.
So the three tools answer different questions. Career pathing says where an employee could go, job shadowing shows one destination at close range, and mentoring accompanies the employee over the time it takes to get there.
Mentoring in talent management
Mentoring is one of the tools on which programmes for high potential employees (الموظف عالي الإمكانات) and succession planning are built. Potential for a larger role is one of the two axes on which the 9 box grid places employees. Mentoring holds that place in succession planning because what prepares a successor is not training content but the experience of the person who holds the role now.
An organisation that plans for succession without any arrangement for passing on that experience has named its successors without preparing them. The plan records who is expected to step in; mentoring is one way in which the experience that the role requires reaches that person before the role falls vacant.
This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.
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