Why Your Mentorship Program Isn’t Working

After five decades of mentoring relationship research, the evidence is irrefutable: people who have strong mentors accrue a host of professional benefits, including more rapid advancement, higher salaries, greater organizational commitment, stronger identity, and higher satisfaction with both job and career. They also see personal benefits, such as better physical health and self-esteem, ease of work-life integration, and strong–er relational skills. At its best, mentoring can transform lives and careers while bolstering retention and maximizing employee potential.

It is little wonder that prospective employees now prioritize the availability of mentoring in choosing an employer. More than 70% of Fortune 500 companies offer mentoring programs of some sort. However, there is little evidence these programs are having broad impact. A recent study of 3,000 professionals across industries reveals that only about half have ever had any mentoring in their careers and, among those who have, only 25% were formally assigned mentors. Most mentoring relationships continue to evolve organically. Perhaps more disheartening, data on the outcomes of formal programs is at best mixed: while some employees assigned mentors report tangible relationship outcomes, a significant number report little benefit, let alone much meaningful engagement.

If there is a single, consistent Achilles heel in organizational mentoring structures, it is marginal mentoring. Marginal or mediocre mentoring may be a consequence of assigning mentors who are too busy, disinterested, dysfunctional, or simply lack competence in the role. Prospective mentors often are randomly selected or told to participate. Leaders fail to give resources to, evaluate, or reward mentoring. With no meaningful incentives attached, it is justifiably seen as an onerous add-on duty, a thankless distraction from real work leading to pay and advancement.

What’s more, too often program leaders erroneously assume that any successful manager can mentor effectively, with minimal (if any) training, and that the art of mentoring is innate or easy to acquire. Since so many never had mentors themselves, they lack mental maps for how it is done well. Evidence indicates that poor mentoring can be worse for employees than no mentoring at all. Ill-prepared and marginally competent mentors not only give mentoring a bad name in an organization. They also sabotage retention, commitment, and employee development — the very objectives that drive mentoring initiatives in the first place.

If you’re looking to create a mentoring program in your organization or improve upon one that already exists, you need a different approach. At a minimum, mentor competence requires functional mentoring skills, or the salient behaviors and strategies of good mentoring. Think of these as teachable micro-skills. For instance, great mentors consistently and skillfully offer generous listening, affirmation, challenge, feedback and insider information, networking, visibility, intentional role-modeling, professional socialization, advocacy, and increasing mutuality and collegiality. There is strong evidence that these skills can be instilled and refined through mentor development training.

You also will need to carefully select mentors on the basis of foundational virtues and abilities. Excellent mentors demonstrate virtues, such as personal integrity, good judgement around boundaries and confidentiality, and an inclination toward caring and acting with their mentee’s best interest at heart. Fundamental relational abilities include other-oriented empathy and self-awareness. It is no surprise that highly rated mentors show high levels of emotional intelligence. Mentees report that, to build trust and successfully launch relationships with them, mentors need empathy, genuineness, and approachability . And let’s be clear: a mentor training workshop will not instill these virtues and abilities. You must recruit people who demonstrate them already in daily practice.

How can you select the best-suited employees to serve as mentors and then give them the preparation and support they’ll require to achieve genuine expertise in the role? Consider the Master Mentor approach, created and first piloted at the School of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University in 2012.

School of Medicine leaders noticed high attrition of junior faculty, particularly women, who often reported feeling invisible and unsupported. Mentoring of junior faculty at the time was infrequent and haphazard in a highly competitive publish-or-perish culture. To address this, Hopkins decided to try something radical: flip the script on mentoring such that selection as a mentor became a competitive process accompanied by perks and recognition.

The Master Mentor approach was designed to create cohorts of experienced and well-trained mentors who are not only effective at enhancing the personal well-being and career trajectories of mentees but also willing to become resources and coaches to less experienced mentors. Successful Master Mentors accelerate the advancement of high-talent hires while elevating the quality of mentoring throughout their organization. Here are the salient components of the model they developed:

The university solicits mentor candidate nominations from directors or managers, specifying that candidates must have a consistent track record of strong informal mentoring. Which mid-level to senior employees do new hires naturally gravitate to for advice and counsel? Who do junior employees consider to be the most generous, caring, and “safe” mentors-of-the-moment? Which of these have the highest EQ, the best communication skills, and a track-record for sponsoring rising stars to success? (Not sure who these folks are? Ask your junior employees.)

A committee selects some of the best candidates from each division or department. For six months this cohort meets routinely for high-level mentor skill-building workshops and case discussions interspersed with lunches featuring consultation with subject matter experts, visits from senior leaders reinforcing the organization’s commitment to a mentoring culture, and discussions about leveraging mentoring to accelerate diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Following this training, Master Mentor certificates are issued — and noted in each graduate’s personnel file — and these mentors now deliberately take on a greater share of the mentoring load in their workplaces.

Each year a new cohort of mentors is selected and trained, gradually permeating the organization with outstanding mentors.

This pilot program yielded some important lessons. First, resources are needed to administer these programs and support Master Mentors to dedicate time in their already busy schedules for this work, making it a high-priority activity. Second, creating and celebrating a culture of excellence in mentoring throughout the organization requires participation by all levels of leadership. Awards, public recognition, and other perks build and reinforce a clear message of institutional priority. Yearly events and graduation ceremonies celebrating new Master Mentors bolster a sense of community and encourage networking and peer consultation among Master Mentors.

This approach is just one way in which you can improve your organization’s mentoring options. Whether you have formal programs, an informal mentoring culture, or some combination of these, it’s time to banish marginal mentoring by changing the narrative about the priority of developmental relationships and carefully selecting, training, and elevating accomplished mentors.

Source: HBR 17 July, 2020

Microsoft and Citrix Partner To Accelerate Cloud Adoption Of Digital Workspaces Amid Pandemic

Citrix Systems, an American multinational software company and Microsoft have come together with a multi-year agreement to accelerate cloud adoption for digital workspaces, the companies said on Wednesday.

“To drive business continuity and growth, organizations will need to embrace more flexible work models that accommodate these new priorities,” read a press statement.

The announcement came in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic when most of the employees are working remotely and are relying heavily on cloud storage.

David Henshall, president and chief executive officer (CEO), Citrix, said, “The COVID-19 pandemic has forced businesses around the world to change the way that employees work, while still meeting the speed and security requirements that today’s uncertain business environment demands. Looking forward, hybrid-work models will become the standard for many customers, requiring a flexible infrastructure to support, secure and empower their teams.”

“As organizations everywhere adapt to new ways of work, they will need to reimagine how and where work gets done,” said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft.

“Together with Citrix, we will apply the power of Azure to this challenge, helping our customers seamlessly and securely connect their employees to their applications, so they can be more agile and productive wherever they are,” he further added.

Citrix and Microsoft will provide joint tools and services to simplify and speed the transition of on-premises Citrix customers to Microsoft Azure. The companies will also devise a connected roadmap to enable a consistent and optimal flexible work experience that will include joint offerings comprised of Citrix Workspace, Citrix SD-WAN, Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 sold through their direct sales forces via the Azure Marketplace.

Citrix will also invest in building a Microsoft-centric Citrix Workspace, providing deep integrations to optimize performance, functionality, and micro-apps for Windows Virtual Desktop and Microsoft 365, including Microsoft Teams.

Source: Entrepreneur India 15 July, 2020

Stop Asking Job Candidates for Their Salary History

In response to nationwide protests, CEOs have committed to fighting discrimination and intolerance and have renewed pledges to increase diversity and fairness within their organizations. But how can they demonstrate that these are more than just empty promises? New research (by Bessen, Denk, and co-author Chen Meng) shows that CEOs can take one simple, immediate action to substantially reduce pay disparities for Black and women employees: Stop asking job applicants about prior pay.

We know that this policy has a major effect on pay disparities because 14 states have banned this practice during the last three years. We have analyzed differences between areas with salary history bans (SHB) and neighboring counties in states without bans. We find that these new laws generated substantial pay increases for Black (+13%) and female (+8%) candidates who took new jobs.

Why do disadvantaged groups see higher pay offers when employers don’t use salary history information? Simply put, that information gives employers a bargaining advantage. Knowing that a job applicant is currently underpaid, employers can offer a bit more than their current pay level, confident that the applicant will accept. But the applicant may still be paid less than they are worth. In this way, pay inequalities are perpetuated. But when access to salary histories is limited, Black and female job applicants see a more level playing field.

There appears to be a growing trend towards including a salary range in help wanted advertisements, even among employers not subject to an SHB, which suggests that many employers have voluntarily decided to stop asking about salary histories. This is a welcome trend, and more employers should follow it for the sake of reducing pay disparities. An employer voluntarily deciding to stop asking about salary history represents a deliberate, specific action that can help reduce pay inequity and, for first movers, serve as a brand boost to make the company a more attractive employer to women and minorities, showing that the employer is actually taking concrete steps to combat institutional discrimination.

There have been arguments both for and against the use of salary history information. Companies and HR professionals have argued, for example, that knowing an applicant’s salary history was imperative to save time for both the applicant and the company during the interviewing process. If the company could not afford the salary the applicant was likely to seek — typically 10-20% more than the current salary — then there would be no sense in making an offer that was not in that range. However, employers can — and increasingly do, as our data show — simply include a salary range with a job posting, and allow the applicant to self-select whether that range is acceptable to them when deciding to apply.

Employers can also gauge the applicant’s pay expectations without asking for their salary history. Even with a salary history ban, an employer can ask what an applicant hopes to earn. And nothing prevents highly paid job applicants from volunteering their current salary to set employer expectations.

Some HR professionals have also argued that the salary history was necessary to determine the applicant’s career trajectory. A track record of steadily increasing salary in previous positions would demonstrate that the applicant was worthy of increasing responsibility and pay. Of course, that information could also be determined qualitatively from the applicant’s resume and from interview questions, or quantitatively through market research of what other companies pay for that same position, or from what the company has paid previous employees in that or similar positions.

Another concern is that salary histories might reveal the quality of the applicant generally, aside from their career trajectory. The worry is that without this information, employers will select lower quality candidates on average, leading to poorer job matches and greater turnover. Our data show that this does not seem to be a significant concern. Turnover rates have not increased in states with salary history bans in general nor have they increased for workers who were relatively underpaid in their previous jobs. In short, our analysis, based on the states that banned employers from using salary histories, shows that employers can hire just as effectively without using this information. At the same time, employers who avoided asking for salary histories were able to significantly reduce unfair pay differences.

Not asking about salary histories is related to a growing trend towards greater salary transparency. Our data show sharp increases in the use of salary ranges in job postings after state-wide enactment of SHB legislation, and not just by employers subject to the ban. Applicants, too, can learn about an employer’s salary range from websites like Glassdoor, which allows current and former employees to post information about their salary and work environment. The greater transparency offers applicants a level playing field, thus reducing discrimination and other inequities both in the hiring process and over time on the job.

Greater transparency benefits both employers and applicants, and also satisfies the needs of HR professionals and CEOs. Arguments on both sides of salary history bans saw the need for transparency and starting the employer-employee relationship on the right foot and in the proper spirit. Although employers are more likely to name a salary range in a job posting because of a salary history ban, they would have not have posted the job if they did not know what they could afford to pay for it. The SHB simply encourages the employer to make explicit what it likely already had in mind when posting the job. Clearly, employers can go beyond the requirements of these laws and voluntarily provide greater information to applicants and employees. That transparency creates a culture that sets the right tone as open and welcoming for employees, helps attract a greater diversity of candidates, and reduces the pay gap for women and persons of color.

Source: 14 July, 2020

5 Tips for Communicating with Employees During a Crisis

Every leader knows that communication during a crisis is critical. When leaders communicate with urgency, transparency, and empathy, it helps people adjust to the constantly changing conditions crises bring. A tone of urgency encourages people to make quick decisions to mitigate harm. Transparency builds trust in leaders and conveys respect for employees by implicitly recognizing them as capable of coping with what is being shared. And showing empathy and conveying a compelling message of hope can foster resilience in facing the challenges that lie ahead.

Yet beyond these basic recommendations, there is scant empirical research on what to communicate to employees amid a crisis. As a result, most executives probably cannot answer the following question: Now that we are several months into the crisis, how are your employees feeling about your organization’s response to the pandemic?

To help leaders fine-tune their communications practices, we created a 12-question assessment designed to measure employee satisfaction with the organization’s overall interactions with them during the Covid-19 crisis and reveal the factors that drive a positive reaction. We sent the assessment to employees in 10 for-profit, not-for-profit, and government organizations and received a total of 830 responses between March 24 and April 22.

There were five key takeaways for leaders, which we describe below in descending order of their importance in influencing employees’ satisfaction with how their employers are dealing with them during the pandemic.

1. Communicate frequently.

Most leaders need to communicate to staff far more often than they think is necessary. Frequent communication reduces fear and uncertainty and ensures that employees have heard the message. While leaders may experience fatigue from repeating core messages, they need to realize team members need to hear these messages multiple times. Different people may need to hear messages in different ways and through different channels.

At a time when so many people are experiencing bad news and negative consequences largely not of their own doing, leaders need to remember to find the bright spots and highlight them. They similarly can offset bad news by reminding people of times when they faced challenges in the past and the organization came out on top (e.g., during the dot.com bust in the early 2000s or the 2008 financial crisis).

How organizational leaders communicate can make or break employee commitment to their organizations. Despite the many challenges the pandemic has brought, one respondent reported, “[Our leader’s] calls with us and reassurances that the company has our back are inspiring. I even used it as a humble brag on social media to make sure people know we are still hiring and that this is the sort of company you want to work for when the going gets tough.”

2. Provide safe channels for giving feedback.

Consider the comment of a disappointed employee we received: “Most information at my company never stays safe. Information always gets out. I don’t know if that is an HR leak or people just don’t know how to stop gossiping, but private information is never safe.” Employees must be able to express their concerns to leaders without fear of retribution.

Organizational leaders must communicate the channels available to offer feedback and should emphasize how much they care about hearing from employees at all levels. For example, organizations might offer the following means for employees to communicate: reaching out to HR, talking to a senior leader, bringing issues to a regular one-on-on meeting with a manager, and having an anonymous suggestion channel.

Having a variety of options is important because individual employees may view the safety of a given channel differently based on such factors as their relationship with their managers, whether they view HR as supportive, and their views of the responsiveness of anonymous formal channels. Having choices about how to give feedback thus helps ensure that people will do so, which, in turn, increases their satisfaction with their company’s actions.

Finally, leaders must periodically report what they are hearing from this feedback. Sharing careful summaries of the questions, concerns, and follow-up actions will increase trust in the leadership at this critical time — trust that is likely to continue after the crisis subsides.

3. Help employees work at home effectively.

Employees who feel they have what they need to remain productive and successful while working remotely are more likely to be satisfied with their organization’s overall response to the pandemic.

If the organization wants to maintain productivity, it may be worth investing in work-from-home equipment. For many, having equipment that’s common in the office (e.g., headsets, second monitors, comfortable chairs and desks) can make a big difference, affecting their productivity. As one employee put it, “Since we were not able to bring all the equipment we usually use to do our jobs on a daily basis, it has been a challenge making the changes needed to continue to perform at the same level we did while on location.”

Similarly, many employees may need help adjusting meeting time expectations based on specific family and child care situations. And given the challenges associated with Zoom fatigue, managers may want to use telephone calls rather than video meetings when connecting for one-on-one or small group discussions with people who know each other already.

4. Address concerns about job security.

Understandably, people are worried about their jobs. Keeping this in mind, leaders should reassure team members that their employment is secure when this is indeed the case. When it is not, employees appreciate knowing all they can as soon as possible so they can plan accordingly. AirBnB’s May 5 announcement that it would have make deep layoffs is a good example of how to deliver such tough news in a timely and frank manner.

5. Provide a plan for the future.

This one is undoubtedly related to employees’ worries about their own jobs. Given the extraordinary crisis we’re now enduring, it’s hardly surprising that many people are anxious about their own organization’s future and look to leaders for cues. Therefore, when communicating, emphasize what is going well for the organization. Further, share as much as you can about your strategy and planning for the future. And be sure to recognize employees who have gone the extra mile to drive business results or help colleagues; it can have a positive ripple effect.

Given how quickly and drastically the pandemic has changed people’s personal and work lives and all the uncertainty that lies ahead, people are looking to their leaders more than ever for guidance and support. As a leader what you say and how you convey it will play a significant part in determining how your organizations perform during these difficult times and after.

Source: HBR 10 July,2020