Page 212 - Retaining Top Employees

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200 Retaining Top Employees

At its core, mentoring is a relationship of openness, free-
dom, and confidence. The protégé should be free to discuss or
not discuss issues as he or she wishes and free to accept or
reject the mentor’s advice. This is very difficult to do when the
mentor is also your direct boss.
Similarly, the mentor must be able to communicate with the
protégé without raising concerns regarding potential punish-
ment or reward. If the protégé feels he or she is being assessed
for promotion or recognition through the mentoring process, the
relationship will never develop into the two-way communication
process it should be.
Does this mean that as a manager you cannot be a mentor
and shouldn’t use mentoring as part of your management style?
Of course not. Good managers know the power of mentoring
and show mentoring attributes regularly—attributes such as
supportiveness, encouragement, and knowledge transfer.
However, it’s one thing for occasional mentoring to take
place within the management function (mentoring as a man-
agement tool) and quite another for a formal mentoring rela-
tionship to be established, grow, and flourish. For a protégé to
regularly receive the full benefit of the mentoring relationship
(and certainly within a formal program environment), the men-
tor must be someone with whom he or she can be wholly
relaxed, outside of the management process.

Separating Mentoring and Managing

Therefore, for your mentoring program to produce best results,
the mentor should not have direct authority over the protégé.
What can you do if this isn’t possible, if the sheer reality of the
numbers means you can’t avoid mentoring some of your key
employees yourself or appointing an employee’s manager or
supervisor to serve as his or her mentor, despite your desire to
keep the mentoring role “pure”? Here are a few suggestions.
• Consider a many-to-one mentoring program, where one
mentor has more than one protégé.