In the ninth in a series of columns dedicated to mentoring, we look at designing mentoring to support organisational talent. This issue: Mentoring to develop talent

Wheel of fortune: Lis Merrick and Paul Stokes

What do you want your mentoring programme to look like? Give the wheel a spin…

In the last issue we looked at the differences between developmental and sponsorship mentoring. Let’s take this into a model of how you can flex mentoring approaches in the most appropriate way to support your company’s talent.

Talent mentoring
We have found that a mixture of developmental and sponsorship mentoring is the most effective way to support organisational talent across all contexts and cultures. However, it is critical to obtain organisational stakeholder, mentor and mentee buy-in, otherwise you risk some mentoring pairs following a different mentoring path than that of their colleagues!
Our Talent Mentoring Wheel helps you decide how much of each element of mentoring to introduce into your programme. All talent mentoring programmes expect an element of the emotional components of:
role-modelling, acceptance and confirmation, professional friendship and counselling. However, the inclusion of career functions tends to be more widely debated by key stakeholders. They must consider the support they are comfortable for the mentor to provide in areas such as increasing the exposure and visibility of their mentee, coaching, providing or suggesting challenging assignments to them, and organisational politics.
Organisations tend to be more black and white about whether or not the mentor is a sponsor and whether they will be allowed to have the mentee under their wing. However, many organisations are unable to stop senior, influential mentors from both sponsoring and providing a large degree of organisational immunity to the mentee.
We developed our wheel framework after supporting and evaluating a number of mentoring programmes where some “interesting” outcomes emerged from the mentoring. Schemes set up with a purely developmental bias quickly gathered momentum and turned into massive sponsorship opportunities for some privileged mentees, or protégés as they became. So we decided to share our learning.
We now use the wheel very routinely as a discussion tool when agreeing with the programme champion, stakeholders and participants what they would like their mentoring to look like.
It is a great way to bring in honesty when discussing the mentoring outcomes the organisation is seeking. Please try it out and let us know what you think.

In the next issue: How we have developed our practice as scheme designers to support talent mentoring for women

Reference
Talent Mentoring Wheel – Merrick & Stokes, 2008 EMCC Conference Prague

Lis Merrick and Paul Stokes are mentoring consultants and members of the Coaching and Mentoring Research Unit at Sheffield Business School. They welcome correspondence on anything to do with mentoring. Contact: Lismerrick@coach mentoring.co.uk or P.K.Stokes@shu.ac.uk

Talent Mentoring Wheel – Merrick & Stokes 2008

Coaching at Work, Volume 7, Issue 5