MOVING BEYOND OLD-FASHIONED MENTORING

Why old-fashioned mentoring programs are insufficient to meet today’s evolving needs

I was listening to an interview with the CEO of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, on NPR the other day and the interviewer joked about the “old-fashioned web.”  The context of his comment was in asking a question around how, given the growth of social networking and people connecting to other people, how relevant will a people-to-content system like Wikipedia be moving forward?  He then asked if Whales thought content-focused systems are old-fashioned.  His comment about the “old-fashioned web,” which was basically a way of saying how much the web has changed, got me thinking about just how much has changed with mentoring.  The reality is that mentoring has been around a heck of a lot longer than the web, so if there can be an “old-fashioned web,” there certainly is “old-fashioned mentoring.” 

For the last ten years or so, we have been working to redefine what mentoring is and can be, and I think it is time to apply a label to some of these concepts.  There is a new way of doing mentoring, and as a result, there is an old-fashioned approach to it as well:

I can best summarize the transition from the old way to the new way as follows: the organizations that are successfully making the transition stopped focusing on the program and began focusing on the need.  By this, I mean that the new approach to mentoring is one that focuses on the root learning and knowledge transfer needs of the organization at an enterprise level.  It does not mean that these organizations won’t look to leverage mentoring as a part of programs such as High Potential Development.  Instead, connecting to those programs is secondary to creating a culture of People-First Learning and knowledge sharing that invites all knowledge workers to make themselves available to advise and learn from one another.

I mentioned this a bit towards the end of my previous blog entry about how organizations are beginning to “loosen the reigns” and focus on engaging the entirety of the organization in People-First Learning processes.  While making an argument by asking questions is not always the best approach, I can’t resist in this instance.  Why wouldn’t an organization want to make the entire breadth and depth of their knowledge ecology available to all of their knowledge workers?  What is “wrong” with allowing people to connect with one another for the sake of learning?  What are people afraid of?  The reality is that I know many of the answers and they often focus on the following type of theme:

“How can we make sure that all the people giving advice are qualified to do so?  What if people give bad advice?  How can we make sure that the advice being provided is what the organization would want people to share?”  (This is old-fashioned thinking, by the way).

My response is pretty simple: When someone walks down the hall and asks a question of their colleague a few offices or cubes over, how does the organization know that this advice is qualified, good, or what they would want people to share?  People are going to connect with one another to share knowledge regardless of the systems available to do so.  The reality is that by allowing people to connect broadly, organizations actually increase the quality of knowledge sharing in a significant way because people have a much larger set of experts to tap into than those who are defined by physical proximity.  And the problem with that is….?

I understand that given what I do for a living, I have a certain bias around these things. Any frustration that you may perceive from me is at least somewhat real and comes from a perspective of understanding the type of root needs that organizations have and knowing that open, enterprise-level mentoring and knowledge sharing systems can easily address many of these needs.  The barrier is the mentality that surrounds “old-fashioned mentoring.” There was a time when what is now old-fashioned was best practice.  So organizations and the people who have run mentoring in the past shouldn’t beat themselves up over having done it wrong.  Instead, it is time to start believing that there is a new way of doing it and it is time to archive the old-fashioned approach and move forward.

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