Archive for the 'Mentors' Category

Archives for Mentors

If you’re not in your company’s mentoring program, you’re stagnating. Or, if you’re in a senior position, then you should establish a succession plan or talent retention program that involves mentoring someone worthy of your time.

Take that bromide, plus two Advil, and let us know how it goes. Despite a slow and imperceptible payback, few question whether mentoring programs benefit employers, managers and their protégés. Yet, these programs are easier to mandate than do successfully.

Mentoring is relatively frictionless when you and your mentor can meet for lunch, coffee or a beer. But in a global enterprise, the mentoring program is most likely a virtual one, with mentors and mentees located in distant cities, different cultures, and remote time zones, too.

“The last few mentees [of mine] have been in California, Maryland, Mexico City and now Arizona,” says Artie Lynnworth, General Manager, Occidental Chemical Corp. in Santiago, Chile. In a Human Capital Institute webcast today he spoke about mentoring a Maryland-based employee via a webcam. Sounds a bit dicey, but he says, “It’s great, it works, and virtual should not be any obstacle at all.”

Lynnworth’s bigger challenges concern dispensing advice that is cross-cultural in nature. “Those are things to be sensitive to,” Lynnworth says. “Guidance that might work in a USA environment might not work in another culture.”