As a mentor, you likely understand the difference between your mentee’s potential for advancement within the company and her readiness for that advancement. In most organizations, there are three simultaneous prerequisites for formal career advancement: timing, opportunity, and sponsorship. Mentors can be involved in all three, but can be “make or break” in regard to the timing issue. In fact, you may be the only one who can make an objective and persuasive case that your mentee is professionally prepared for promotion or for a new role at the time it becomes available.
But what if your mentee’s next role requires some additional new skills – skills so critical to success that you’re uncertain about her readiness? The solution: ENLIST MODELS. For example, your mentee has been an effective field sales representative but has no significant contract negotiation experience – could you endorse his move up to regional sales manager? Or she’s a bench scientist in R&D but has limited exposure to customers – could you endorse her move out to a full time field technical service representative? Negotiation and customer-interface skills are only two examples of skill sets that can be learned on the job – learned by exposure of your mentee to company colleagues who already successfully practice those skills and who can serve as models. These collaborations can be flexible in form and limited in duration, since the function of these collaborations is focused knowledge and skills transfer from the model to the mentee. Continuing with the above “readiness” examples:
- The field sales representative is paired with one or two sales managers engaged in preparation and completion of several face-to-face negotiations over a period of one or two quarters. The field sales rep is essentially part of the company’s negotiation team, led by the experienced sales managers.
- The bench scientist is paired with a full time field technical service representative, forming a two-person team dedicated to responding proactively and reactively to field technical service issues over a period of two or more quarters.
A mentor who pairs such a model of skills-in-action with his mentee in a successful working collaboration adds significant value to the business through increasing the likelihood of the mentee’s success in the new role.
For much more on how and why to be a better career mentor, see my full article “How (and Why) to Be a Better Career Mentor to Women” published in AMA Quarterly, Summer 2018, p. 45 https://www.amanet.org/uploaded/amaquarterly-summer-18.pdf
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