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Key points
- Seventy-five percent of executives credit their success to mentors.
- Ninety percent of employees with a career mentor are happy at work.
- Most mentoring programs fall short of effectiveness, particularly when it comes to minorities and women.
Those who want to grow professionally or attain success in their careers would do well to find a mentor. Organizations that hope to retain and develop talent can develop effective mentoring programs. According to CJ Gross in the Harvard Business Review, “The evidence is clear: 75 percent of executives credit their success to mentors and recent research shows that 90 percent of employees with a career mentor are happy at work.”
As Gross and others have pointed out, even though 84 percent of Fortune 500 companies have mentoring programs, most programs fall short of effectiveness, particularly when it comes to minorities and women. A new book, The Financial Times Guide to Mentoring, seeks to demystify the art of mentoring and help professional leaders, individual mentors, and organizations in general provide the mentoring their talent needs.
The book opens with the powerful story of Nicole Stott, the first astronaut to operate the space station’s robotic arm to catch a free-flying cargo spacecraft. A NASA engineer with her pilot’s license, Stott hesitated to pursue her dream of becoming an astronaut because she thought, “That’s what other special people get to do.” But then, Jay Honeycutt, the former director of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, mentored her and encouraged her to apply.
Like so many others, Stott was not accepted on her first application, but Honeycutt pushed her to reapply. “Here’s how we can, not why we can’t,” he told her. In the end, Stott spent 104 days in space on two missions and went on to found the Space for Art Foundation.
If mentoring is so important to professional development, why is it not more widely implemented? As co-authors, Dr. Ruth Gotian, an expert in mentorship and Chief Learning Officer at Weill Cornell Medical School, and Andy Lopata, a specialist in professional networking and mentoring in Europe, write, “Delivering and receiving impactful mentoring is often an enigma. We know it when we see it, but often don’t know how to deliver or receive it effectively.”
The book identifies the key challenges that get in the way of effective mentoring and offers solutions to address them. At an organizational level, mentoring programs often lack clarity about the desired outcome of the mentoring relationship. Treated like an add-on, both mentors and mentees can find it hard to carve out time for the relationship. And mentoring programs rarely have robust matchmaking systems, leaving mentees with the wrong mentor. At the individual level, mentors and mentees lack training on how to approach and get the most out of the relationship.
The rest of the book lays out a clear, research-backed tutorial for both individuals and organizations on how to make mentoring work. With helpful graphics, relevant case studies, and practical worksheets, the book makes the path to effective mentoring easy to follow.
This timely book is a critical step toward making effective mentoring more widely available. As the authors point out, individuals with mentors earn higher salaries, get promoted more often, have greater job and career satisfaction, and have lower rates of burnout. Who wouldn’t want that? And what organization would not want the benefit of higher productivity and greater loyalty that comes from well-mentored employees? The Financial Times Guide to Mentoring is an essential guide for those looking to make mentoring work.
