Make Mentoring Memorable

Along the way people planted seeds in my soul and spirit and added stones to the foundation I was trying to form.

—Lisa Fain, quoted in Creating a Mentoring Culture: The Organization Guide by Lois Zachary (John Wiley and Sons, 2005).

hen I began my human resources career, I was thrilled when a leader in my organization picked me as a protégé. His advice was helpful in navigating the unknown waters of corporate America; however, I was soon in the middle of a political battle of corporate power and wills. Although I learned about personal loyalty and organization alignment in this process, that experience, even 20 years later, still leaves a bitter taste about power struggles and corporate politics.

So, when a second executive tapped me to be a "high potential," I was more cautious than excited. Again, learning the ropes from someone who has gone before is indeed a benefit of having a mentor. Unfortunately, like my first experience, instead of catapulting my career, I was once again used as a pawn to shield amentor.

So, after two early, negative experiences, I was disillusioned and did not immediately seek out, or accept offers from, potential mentors. However, I continued to observe leaders that I admired and those that weren’t always effective, learning from both types. I examined mentoring programs and talked to HR professionals who had positive and negative experiences with mentors. Hence, I assumed my current—and more positive—point of viewon mentoring through observation, research and self-reflection.

My experiences as a mentor and a protégé during the past 10 years have been personally rewarding and professionally invaluable. During the past three years, I have done a tremendous amount of research on best practices.

Contemporary mentoring focuses on learning partnerships, with mentor and protégé playing action roles. Whether the mentoring relationship comes together formally or informally, it should have an educational framework with objectives, development goals, shared roles and outcomes.

As I learned from my first experiences, mentoring is not an innate skill, so mentors and protégés should receive training, tools and support. Mentoring relationships are short in duration, but the dialogue and work should focus on a long-term scope of the protégé’s profession, and look at the person holistically during different stages of his or her life and career.

Mentors don’t develop people; they equip protégés to learn for themselves by sharing experiences, asking great questions, challenging decision-making and expanding problem-solving skills. A mentor becomes a catalyst for professional change and growth. A mentor inspires the mind and heart of the protégé. Below, I offer a framework—in the form of an acrostic—to make your partnerships more MEMORABLE.

Yet you must include the protégé’s manager in the process. When I began mentoring free-spirited Pierre Rougny, director of rehabilitation services at Sebasticook Valley Hospital—a new, talented front-line manager—it was clear that we needed to include his corporate-minded manager Mike Peterson, vice president of clinical services.

I start each new relationship with a mentor-protégé agreement outlining the roles of each individual, setting realistic expectations and establishing specific, custom objectives. In Rougny’s agreement, we agreed upon providing monthly feedback to Mike on the projects we were working on and the progress made. Once I began working with Rougny, and with little prompting, he began suggesting innovative solutions to his department’s challenges. In addition to working with Rougny on creating these proposals and gaining executive support, I also spent time coaching Peterson to be open-minded to alternatives and selling other people’s recommendations for changeto senior leaders. Both Rougny’s and Peterson’s reputations were enhanced during this collaboration.

Mentors model, share and facilitate, while protégés observe, question and explore. The mentoring model of learning requires participation and shared activity by both parties.

My relationship with Lisa Madore, human resources manager at Valley Distributors Inc., began as a teacher for a Society for Human Resource Management HR certification preparation class. Oncethe class ended, Madore asked me to help her be a stronger strategic HR business partner in her company.

Madore was an inexperienced, mostly self-taught, HR professional. I quickly learned that she had many organizational hurdles. However, we worked for 12 months on a variety of projects and assignments to enhance the role of HR in her organization. She worked on HR strategic planning, we examined common HR metrics, and she researched best practices. Madore sent me her written materials to critique and help her expand and support her recommendations. She was open-minded to the feedback and kept improving.

Her initial recommendations were met with resistance, but Lisa never gave up and we worked on her presentations, ensuring that she added better statistics and financials. She was able to get some initial management and financial support to enhance the HR function. We still touch base, and Madore continues to make slow but steady progress with her business owners and is becoming an influential HR leader.

Another protégé was looking to enhance her voice at the executive table. "Aretha"(not her real name) was an experienced member of the senior leadership team at a progressive company. Yet top managersstill viewed HR as a reactive, transactional function, rather than a proactive, transformational influence center. I worked with Aretha for almost a year, sharing my 20-plus years of HR knowledge and utilizing all my mentoring skills, yet we never moved off square one. Aretha and Iworked on some excellent strategic-planning assignments, and I provided her honest feedback on how to improve. Yet every time she was encouraged to present her work to senior managers, she responded that it wouldn’t work in her culture or that it hadn’t gone well. When I sought insight, Aretha had difficulty defining what was happening. She also had a tendency to blame others. Aretha’s lack of progress did not come from lack of skills, planning or effort, but from the inability to examine her professional development and to reflect on how others respond to her.

One of my most rewarding mentor relations also was the most untraditional. I was asked to mentor Linda Woolley, regional director for Eastern Maine HomeCare, as a requirement for her participation in a health care leadership academy. Linda has a long and distinguished health care career and had more life and work experience and as many management skills as I did. How could I enhance her professionally?

Woolley and I had worked together for several years in the same organization, but due to restructuring we were working for different organizations in a larger health care system. We immediately found common ground to explore our experiences and to help one another have a clearer understanding of the system’s overall strategy and culture and how to better navigate politically.

Woolley wanted an expanded role in the new home-health organization; and during our mentoring relationship this opportunity came to fruition. She leveraged my HR experience to discuss employment negotiations. I encouraged her to look at pay and to negotiate scheduling and travel time to benefit herself now that she would be managing multiple locations.

Woolley showed me that mentor relations need to be learning-based and driven by the protégé for maximum results. She knew what she wanted from a mentor and called for meetings at key steps as her expanded management goal was becoming a reality. Woolley and I always met over lunch, and we both saw that networking and learning can and should be fun and relaxed. Although we started the relationship as mentor and protégé, it was clear we were equal-learning partners.

As we were ending our mentor relationship, my significant other had a massive stroke. Woolley’s mother had also suffered a stroke. Because of the trust we had created, we reversed roles. Woolley became the mentor and I the student on becoming an effective caregiver. Woolley’s insight and support were invaluable. I love sharing this example to demonstrate that mentors have much to learn from protégés.

We need to look at mentoring as life long. Whether we are just breaking into the human resources profession or are retiring as chief HR officer, others who have already been there can help us objectively see what we want to do next and how best to accomplish it. Like a career consisting of numerous jobs, our growth and learning should rely on a variety of mentors.

Mentoring can be magical when two people have a commitment to self-discovery and growth. When done well,mentoring will be memorable.Find a mentor to help you develop personally or professionally. Be a mentor and leave a lasting legacy.