The Moving Ahead Program of St. Francis House, Boston

Several years ago, I had the privilege of being invited to a special graduation celebration for a half-dozen adults who had successfully completed the Moving Ahead Program offered by the St. Francis House in Boston, Massachusetts.

“MAP”, as it’s known, is a 14-week job- and life-skills training program for individuals who have experienced serious disruption in their personal life: homelessness, addiction, mental illness, incarceration.

MAP offers essential tools, training, and support to those who are accepted into the program:

Transitional housing
One-on-one job coaching support
Internship opportunities
Weekly stipend and public transportation pass
Clothing and image consultation program
Individualized counseling, referrals, and legal support
Lifetime access to St. Francis House services through its Alumni Program

MAP “Life Skills” instructors teach:

Resume writing
Online job searching, filing applications electronically
Preparing for interviews
Setting goals
Developing positive interpersonal relationships
Dealing with trauma and negative emotions

The MAP program works!

A total of 97 students were served in 2018, with a graduation rate of 70%
82% of graduates were employed at time of graduation
Average hourly wage of employed graduates was 42% more than the Massachusetts minimum wage

The MAP program has been recognized!

Selected by HUD to serve as a “best practices” model for other HUD-funded programs considering replicating MAP
MAP-Topeka (Kansas) and MAP-St. Louis (Missouri) both launched

But for me, the MAP success I’ll never forget was what I experienced at the graduation ceremony:

the JOY and GRATITUDE of the graduates!

For more on the Moving Ahead Program at St. Francis House, Boston, see https://stfrancishouse.org/programs/moving-ahead-program/

Mentoring an Introvert? Five Points to Consider

If the personality descriptors “introvert” and “extrovert” are familiar to you, you may already recognize which of your work colleagues belong more to one category than the other. If one of your mentees is an introvert, here are five points to keep in mind:

Your mentee may work independently…independently of you and her work colleagues. This does NOT mean that she’s not collaborative, or that she’s not a team player. Her preference is to think about and complete her specific tasks by herself before delivering them (complete and on time!) to the team.
Your mentee rarely speaks up in large meetings. This does NOT mean that she doesn’t have something useful to say. Rather, her preference is to listen to what’s going on in the meeting, take time to think about what’s said, and then consider all aspects of the discussion before formulating a response. Ask her for her opinions after the meeting, perhaps the next day, and chances are you’ll get them!
Your mentee seems to procrastinate about decisions or about taking action. This does NOT mean that she’s unconcerned or lazy. Rather, she has a strong preference to think before acting, to avoid bad decisions or unproductive/unsuccessful activities.
Your mentee attends company-wide functions but may be among the last to arrive and the first to leave after clustering with a few colleagues she knows well. This does NOT mean she is ungrateful or lacks interest in the company as a whole. Rather, she strongly prefers one-on-one gatherings over large group social functions.
Your mentee’s ideas sometimes seem “out-of-the-box”, perhaps even “out of left field”. Such “original” thinking reflects an introvert’s preference to think and work alone, with little, if any, input from the outside. Welcome these new ideas – then vet and test them!

For a mentor, understanding that your mentee is an introvert and that her preferences and actions will consistently reflect that can help you prepare to engage in collegial and productive discussions and direct you both toward achieving your business and professional goals.

Yes, MENTORS, there IS a PAYOFF!

What business roles have the greatest return on investment as measured by revenue and economic growth? The Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) in collaboration with Ernst and Young (EY) explored this very issue. The scope of their study was broad and deep: approximately 22,000 publicly traded global companies; 91 countries; a range of industries and sectors. The results of their study were published in a 2016 report titled Is Gender Diversity Profitable? Evidence from a Global Study. Among the reported findings and related implications:

An organization with 30% female leaders could add up to 6 percentage points to its net margin.
Payoffs from policies that enable women rising through the corporate ranks could be significant.
The largest economic gain came from the proportion of female executives within the firm, followed by the proportion of female board members.
There is a “robust and positive” correlation between having female management, and presumably a pipeline of female future leaders, with increased firm profitability.

Think about this: an organization with 30% female leaders could add up to 6 percentage points to its net margin. Mentors and managers, if you were challenged to add 6 percentage points to your company’s net margin, how would you do it? If you haven’t yet elevated formal mentoring of your women staff for the purpose of developing a pipeline of female future leaders, you’re ignoring a strategic business process with demonstrated power to improve profitability. 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

A Diagnostic Checklist for Your Mentoring Program

All stakeholders in the mentoring process—the company, the mentor, and the mentee—benefit when mentors think and act strategically.

Whether you’re just beginning a mentoring program or already have one, consider the following diagnostic checklist of effective mentoring practices to identify potential improvements for your process:

Is mentoring a priority?

How visible are your mentee’s assignments to upper management?

How and how often do you review progress on assignments with your mentee?

What resources are available to help your mentee learn and navigate the workplace culture?

How does the mentee learn about external market and industry dynamics that affect your business?

Do you have a mentoring process that specifically addresses senior-level mentees?

For a deeper dive into this post, along with “answers” to the diagnostic questions above, see the full text article in the AMA Playbook, accessible here https://playbook.amanet.org/training-articles-checklist-evaluate-mentoring-program/#.XGrZWxEhYCQ.link

Tactical Mentoring

Whether or not you are formally recognized as a mentor in your organization, you may be a “tactical” mentor. Think of a tactical mentor as one who pro-actively engages with a mentee for a situation-specific need.

Here’s an example of tactical mentoring in a situation that is fairly common in the workplace in many industries: A mentee is about to deliver her first project review presentation to a group of colleagues. The group includes members of the management team with oversight responsibility for the overall program that includes this specific project. It’s no exaggeration to say that this presentation could be “make or break”, not only for the presenter, but for her immediate supervisor and even for the project itself.

In this situation, someone who is experienced in successfully preparing and delivering such project review presentations could offer some critical tactical mentoring. Here are the issues a tactical mentor could help the mentee address:

How much time do I have for my oral presentation?
How long should the written presentation be?
What format do I use for the written presentation? For any handouts accompanying the oral presentation? For an online presentation?
What issues are most important to management regarding my project?
Should I present our findings upfront? Before we discuss how we arrived at them?
How do I handle uncertainties about our project outcomes so far?
Where and how should I address remaining project milestones, schedule, and budget?

For a seasoned team member, experienced in preparing and delivering project review presentations such as this, the answers are usually obvious. For a new team member, however, the answers are usually not at all obvious, and advance attention to all of these issues is essential for a successful presentation, well worth the preparation and mentoring time and effort involved.

The lessons for new mentees and project managers:

Keep your eyes open for those in your company who could serve as tactical mentors in situations that could be “make or break” for your workplace career
Enlist the help of a tactical mentor early and often when such situations arise

What if Your Mentee’s Next Role Requires Skills You Don’t Have?

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

A Checklist for Mentors

Mentors, here is the good news: it’s likely that all elements you need to carry out an effective mentoring program are already available within your company. Whether you’re just beginning a mentoring program or already have one in place, consider the following diagnostic checklist of effective mentoring practices to learn where you may want to make improvements to your process:

Is mentoring a priority?

Mentoring is a management activity, not just a management responsibility. A mentor proactively and directly interacts with staff being mentored. If you are a mentor and your mentoring activities appear at least twice a week on your calendar, you are visibly and actively making mentoring a priority for both you and your mentee.

How visible are your mentee’s assignments to upper management?

Mentored staff should be assigned a “real” project as soon as they join the work unit. The new staff as well as the mentor need to quickly develop a sense of where and how the mentee can contribute to projects that matter. If the mentee’s project is important enough to show up on the monthly or quarterly general management review agenda, it’s a highly visible assignment.

How and how often do you review progress on assignments with your mentee?

Mentors should schedule a weekly review meeting for each project in which the mentored staff participate. Ask that the new staff prepare written weekly summaries in advance of the review meeting. The entire project team, as well as the new staff, benefit from this discipline of preparing written summaries in advance.

What resources are available to your mentee to learn and navigate the workplace culture?

Mentors should introduce the new staff member to established staff members who can serve as resources for questions related to the key support tasks of daily life at the office/lab/shop. If resources are available and in place for the mentee to tap, you’ve effectively and usefully expanded your mentee’s internal network.

How does your mentee learn about external market and industry dynamics that affect your business?

Mentors should schedule regular one-to-one “touch base” meetings not associated with performance evaluation activities. These “touch base” meetings should be office-based but without a formal agenda to allow free-ranging conversations. These more free-ranging conversations provide the opportunity for mentors to introduce forward-looking topics such as changing market or industry dynamics and the company’s planned responses to them.

What are the opportunities to transition a mentor to assignments with greater responsibility/autonomy?

Mentors should treat mentored staff as adults, even if they are “junior” staff based on age or experience. Mentored staff are with your company to contribute and they want to contribute to the real project to which they’ve been assigned.

What access does your mentee have to needed domain or subject matter experts within the company?

Both mentor and mentee should recognize and utilize the good will that usually exists among more experienced staff toward new, less experienced staff members. As the need arises, the mentor should identify other more senior staff who can serve as a resource for project-specific issues that arise during the course of the work. For mentees, senior staff input can help get projects “unstuck.” For senior staff, having a mentee succeed after following the guidance they provided is gratifying.

Do your mentoring processes reflect needs unique to mentees “fresh out of school”?

Employees fresh out of school, with little or no prior experience in a corporate work environment, benefit from mentoring that addresses issues specific to that situation. Aside from all the issues addressed in the previous diagnostic/checklist points, there is the additional issue of these new-to-business employees being unfamiliar with aspects of business that all of your experienced employees take for granted, e.g., company/business vocabulary; firm business and financial objectives; company communications, both top down and horizontal; and ways in which different departments interact with each other. Review the content and format of your orientation sessions, perhaps with the input from a fresh-from-school employee who joined a year or two ago, to identify gaps in your existing onboarding practices and how to fill them.

Do you have a mentoring process that specifically addresses senior level mentees?

A key marker of senior-level employees is strategic thinking. Thinking and acting strategically is a transferable skill – one that enhances a mentee’s prospects for advancement to other roles within the company. Through all of the mentor-led discussions described previously, the mentee herself begins to think and act strategically, strengthening the alignment between her personal professional goals and those of the company. If the mentee is fully engaged in producing outcomes that the company values, she will be noticed – and noticed favorably – by her colleagues. As a mentor, once you see that happening, you know you’ve contributed effectively to your mentee’s career development

Meeting Your Mentor at Starbucks? Think Again!

Visit one of the more popular and well-known coffee shop chains during any workday and you’re likely to see business going on. Solo entrepreneurs and freelancers are deeply immersed in their mobile devices or PCs, looking settled in for the day at their “office.” One-on-one conversations are happening at other tables: networking, informational interviews, job interviews, meeting a colleague from another company to hatch a great new idea. Other coffee shop meetings look much more serendipitous: someone spots a friend or business associate and starts a conversation that lasts as long as the latte does. Then, off to the “real office” refreshed and invigorated.

These “off campus” locations are so popular with working millennials and other business people that Microsoft Office 365 has an app that enables people to schedule meetings at Starbucks via Outlook! Such venues do provide an informal, casual atmosphere that can help develop and strengthen the personal relationships that reinforce business relationships.

But it’s just that informal, casual atmosphere can limit the usefulness of these venues for internal mentor and mentee conversations (internal meaning that both mentor and mentee belong to the same organization).

Mentoring is first and foremost a business activity, and the relationship between a mentee and mentor is a professional one. The mentor is a unique resource for the mentee’s successful “onboarding” and subsequent professional development and advancement within the company. With respect to development of the mentee’s career, the mentor maintains an ongoing and performance-oriented awareness of the mentee’s skills, style, contributions, strengths, and preferences over time and uses this awareness for advice, coaching, and/or redirection. With respect to the mentee’s career advancement, the mentor can be the first to spot potential opportunities, as well as provide sponsorship of the mentee for those opportunities.

Most if not all of these internal mentee/mentor activities and interactions may be best carried out within the workplace (e.g., in an office, conference room, company cafeteria)– ideally as part of established company business practices. For the mentee, internal mentee/mentor communication can help produce the most desirable outcomes of mentoring.

Moreover, workplace-based conversations can enhance that communication in the following ways:

Improved timeliness: Said another way: “catch someone doing something right – and tell them right now!” If you’ve made a valuable contribution to a sales meeting, marketing presentation, research project, wouldn’t you like to know it? It’s satisfying and motivating to hear your mentor say, “you did a good job,” followed by some specific comments on what was good. Simple, straightforward communication like that can happen in the hallway or inside/outside the conference room – no need to wait to schedule time at a coffee shop!
Greater frequency: Closely associated with improved timeliness is frequency of feedback. How often would you want to schedule a meeting at an offsite location? Once per week? Once per month? In contrast, onsite feedback could easily happen multiple times per week, without the logistic complications of getting to and from an offsite location.
Better quality: Outside, informal venues, where you’re watching the clock to be sure you get back to the office for the next work obligation, aren’t conducive to back-and-forth discussion. A monologue from a time-pressed mentor may not lead to a shared understanding of the issues you wanted to discuss in more depth. A quality conversation needs focused time and attention from both parties. If you need or want that, seek to schedule a meeting in the office.
Favorable management and peer perceptions: The unwritten (and sometimes unexpressed) rule is that the purpose of offsite meetings, no matter how ostensible the business intent, is to promote and develop personal relationships. If a mentor and mentee are viewed as being more friends than professional colleagues, management and peers may view the mentor as being unable to remain objective while delivering feedback. In contrast, mentee/mentor professional relationships developed and exercised within the formalities of the workplace are less likely to trigger such perceptions and, instead, result in favorable management and peer perceptions.

When might you consider an offsite venue for an internal mentee/mentor conversation? When you’ve accomplished a significant goal, objective, milestone, or achievement. Head to the nearest, nicest, most congenial coffee shop for “lattes all around!”

This blog was originally published in the Association for Talent Development: Think Twice About Meeting Your Mentor at Starbucks!

Mildred Hastbacka, Ph.D., is principal contributor to this Work Matters blog and is also Founder and Managing Member of Prakteka LLC, a business-focused technology consulting company. She has more than 30 years of industrial experience in business management, marketing, commercial development, manufacturing technical support, and product and process research and development at Corporate and Divisional levels. Learn more at http://www.prakteka.com or email Mildred at mah@prakteka.com.

Lessons Learned from the Front Lines of Mentoring

Start a social media conversation thread about mentoring and the replies from those in the working world will get your attention. At the summary level, the responses are remarkably similar across geographies, types of business, professions, genders, age, and years of experience. Professionals know what “mentoring” is but, more often than not, their experiences of it in practice are unsatisfying: mentoring seemed impersonal, unofficial, casual, perfunctory, ineffective, or simply absent. Frequently, the mentee was left to identify their own mentor, even in companies with other well-codified business processes!

What’s also often missing from mentoring is the “how”—as in, the “how to do it right.” I have been mentored and been a mentor during the entire span of my working life in both large and small companies. Based on that cumulative and varied experience, I can say that mentoring done right is a management activity that yields noticeably higher levels of management and employee satisfaction, engagement, contribution and productivity. Here are seven lessons I’ve learned from the front lines of mentoring regarding how to do it right:

Mentoring is a management activity, not just a management “responsibility.” A mentor proactively and directly interacts with staff being mentored. If you are a mentor/manager and your mentoring activities appear at least twice a week on your calendar, you’re doing it right.
Mentored staff should be assigned a “real” project as soon as they join the work unit. The new staff as well as the mentor/manager need to quickly develop a sense of where and how the mentee can contribute to projects that matter. If the mentee’s project is important enough to show up on the monthly or quarterly general management review agenda, you’re doing it right.
Mentor/managers should schedule a weekly project review meeting for each project in which the mentored staff participate. Ask that the new staff prepare written weekly summaries in advance of the review meeting. The entire project team, as well as the new staff, benefit from this discipline of preparing written summaries in advance. If your mentee pro-actively contributes to the review meeting discussion and development of “next step” action plans, you’re doing it right.
Mentor/managers should introduce the new staff member with established staff members who can serve as resources for questions related to the key support tasks of daily life at the office/lab/shop. Some examples of these key support tasks include time card practices, ISO quality procedures, purchasing procedures, and, equally importantly, the “unwritten” rules of life in the work unit and in the company. Check back with the mentee to learn if there are any other procedures that need to be covered. If resources are available and in place for the mentee to tap, you’re doing it right.
Mentor/managers should set up regular one-to-one “touch base” meetings not associated with performance evaluation activities. These “touch base” meetings should be office-based but without a formal agenda: their purpose is to allow time for the mentor/manager to discuss company-related topics not necessarily connected with ongoing projects—and for the mentee to do the same. Formal performance evaluation discussions are usually limited in scope and necessarily backward looking, i.e., focused on specific work already performed. The more free-ranging conversations in a touch base meeting provide the opportunity for mentor managers to introduce forward looking topics such as changing market or industry dynamics and the company’s planned responses to them. If you’re having touch base meetings at least once per week in first 3-4 months of the mentee’s employment, you’re doing it right.
Mentor/managers should treat mentored staff as adults, even if they are “junior” staff based on age or experience. Mentored staff are with your company to contribute and they want to contribute to the real project to which they’ve been assigned. If the mentee is surprised that they are successfully doing more advanced work or exercising more responsibility than they expected, then you’re doing it right.
Both mentor/manager and mentee should recognize and utilize the good will that usually exists among the more experienced staff toward new, less experienced staff members. As the need arises, the manager/mentor should identify other more senior staff who can serve as a resource for project-specific issues that arise during the course of the work. For mentees, senior staff input can help get projects “unstuck”. For senior staff, having a mentee succeed after following their guidance is gratifying. Watch for indications that mentees are engaging with senior staff, even if informally at coffee or in the office. If you see that engagement, especially on a regular basis, you’re doing it right.

One final lesson learned

From my conversations with mentors over the years and right up to the present, there is one more lesson learned: mentors report that mentoring is one of the most rewarding experiences of their professional and personal lives. There is a “feel-good” feeling that results from successful mentoring—one that isn’t duplicated by any other management activity. Perhaps you, as a mentor manager reading this post, have experienced this feeling already. If so, then you’ve done it right!

Also published in Thoughtleaders LLC: http://www.thoughtleadersllc.com/2017/11/7-lessons-learned-from-the-front-lines-for-mentoring-done-right/

Mildred Hastbacka, Ph.D., is Founder and Managing Member of Prakteka LLC, a business-focused technology consulting company. She has more than 30 years of industrial experience in business management, marketing, commercial development, manufacturing technical support, and product and process research and development at Corporate and Divisional levels. In addition to her expertise in project planning and management, she is also a recognized expert in technology assessment, technology commercialization and technology valuation.

mah@prakteka.com