Bridging the Gap: Becoming a mentor

(Brendan Coutts, 'Australian Institute of Training and Development Journal ' - April 2004)

Imagine a workplace where management bans staff from talking socially during work time in the mistaken belief that it will increase productivity. Staff will resent management for making it difficult for them to be and express themselves at work. They will spend energy on finding ways to circumvent management's rules, rather than spending it on doing work. And even worse, management will not know these things are happening.

These managers won't have a clear understanding of their staff of the relationship between the workers and their work, so they won't be able to make skilful decisions about how best to organise their resources. Performance and morale will be mediocre. This sort of situation is not rare. We have found that workers feel constrained by rules and management in the majority of workplaces. In these cases, management has lost access to the very information which is most important - understanding about their staff.

In many organisations, there often appears to be a division between the interests of management and the interest of the employee. Traditionally, things like productivity, quality, service and profitability have been seen as management goals. Workers, on the other hand, are thought to be interested in personal fulfilment and income. The apparent division between these factions largely disappears when the management role moves closer to that of mentor. Where management and worker onjectives become more aligned, workplace health and performance can improve for all parties.

The High Performance Workplace

High performance workplaces are characterised by people being able to do what they do best as much as possible. It is obvious that people will achieve more when they do what they do well, rather than when they attempt to do what they do badly. Likewise, when people bolster their strengths, they improve more than when they work on their weaknesses.

In many workplaces, management believes it knows what needs to be done and how it should be done. Managers design the work and staff are made to adapt. But in higher performance workplaces, management understands where the strengths and weaknesses of their staff lie, and they play to the strengths and compensate for weaknesses (Buckingham and Coffman, 1999). They make the work fit the worker.

For a manager to be able to do this successfully, they must first know their staff. And for this to happen, the staff must trust their manager and feel they can be themselves at work. Where there are rules, written or unwritten, which prevent people from being openly themselves at work, a division is created between the worker and their workplace which leads to frustration and mediocre performance.

For managers, the more they can play to the strengths of their staff, the more they can optimise the performance of their workplace. To do this, a manager must be able to know their staff, allow them to be themselves, and respect them for who they are. Rather than wishing their staff were different, or that they would listen more to management, the manager would listen to to their staff and respond positively to their issues. Where people feel that they are respected and listened to, they are more open - resulting in deeper trust and respect.

This is the environment in which a manager can make skilful decisions about what is best for the workplace and the worker. With this level of intimate understanding, it is often clear that what is good for one is good for the other. People want to feel they are achieving something at work, and management wants them to achieve. These goals can be in alignment.

Achieving Alignment

To achieve alignment, the role of the manager shifts from the traditional top-down, command and control view, to one which is closer to the idea of mentoring. The manager achieves organisational goals best when they see their role as encouraging people to be themselves and to do what they do well. Successful careers tend to emerge from a path where people seek to learn more about themselves and what they do well, rather than pursue higher earnings or prestige (Drucker, 1999).

Thus, the successful manager-mentor promotes coaching or training in which the employee learns more about themselves as well as learning more about their work.

Under this model, staff feel safe approaching the manager-mentor with issues about their work without worrying that it may count against them. If the mentor's best interests lie elsewhere in the workplace, the manager-mentor would support their move. Rather than be critical of mistakes or weakneses, the successful leader will attempt to compensate for the weaknesses of their staff personally, or through the strengths of other staff members.

In considering how managers can move towards a more aligned workplace culture, certain factors emerge.

      1. Relax formal rules and attitudes so staff can act as they feel without fear of being criticised or punished.

      2. Discuss how staff feel about their work and workplace.

      3. Listen to staff and act on what they say.

      4. Work with them to see where their abilities are best suited.

      5. Rather than telling them what to do, agree on outcomes that serve the organisation and which the employee finds meaningful. Then let them achieve these outcomes in their own ways.

      6. Support them to achieve these results.

Benefits of Being a Manager-Mentor

Evidence suggests that creating this type of environment is not easy. Our experience is that there is widespread non-alignment between employees and management in Australian workplaces. But it is also true that this type of healthy and productive workplace does exist.

Our research has shown that in these environments managers enjoy the benefits of better productivity, better communications, less stress, better quality work, improves service, more innovation and a more adaptable and robust workplace. At the same time staff find work more fulfilling and have better career prospects.

The approach requires the manager to place a great degree of trust in the worker. It is often difficult to listen to employees and to allow them to make their own decisions. Managers often believe that they know the best way. They might believe that the staff are untrustworthy. They might believe that workers don't have the ability to make good judgements or achieve their objectives without being shown how to do it.

But when a manager's role comes closer to that of a mentor, they see their staff as indivisuals who can only do things in their own way and who must learn from experience. In trusting their people, the people learn to be more trustworthy. These managers also know where their staff members' strengths lie and will provide them with work targeted towards these strengths, avoiding giving them work to which they are ill-suited. (If they are not suited to any work, they probably belong somewhere else.)

However, moving from a command and control manager to a manager-mentor is not a matter of simply applying a few techniques. It involves a fundamental shift in beliefs about people and the way they relate to their work. The manager-mentor must truly believe that people want to find personal meaning in their work. When there is this belief, the manager-mentor will look for ways that this desire is aligned with the goals of the organisation.

And how does the manager know whether they are achieving this? They can ask their staff, the people who can give some of the best guidance possible. After all, managers need mentors too.