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1. 08-01-2008 14:45

This is great in concept. It has never been a formal program at any company I have worked for, but I have experienced mentoring from both sides of the equation and it has always been positive. In fact, employees I have mentored, or have been mentored by others I have known have been happier, more productive, and more engaged than employees who have not had this experience. Sadly, smaller workforces, longer hours, more production required from each employee has made this difficult to do in a meaningful way.

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2. 02-18-2009 19:06

Earlier in my career, I took a position as department manager for a ten-person SCM/RE group. At the end of a very long interview, one of the vice-presidents took me aside and admonished me that I was inheriting a department with a deer-in-the headlights look about it. Apparently the two preceding managers wee primarily technicians with no interest in the staff. Consequently there was absolutely no push-back when members of entirely different organizations asked SCM/RE staff to perform totally non-related tasks. 
 
My first response was to tell the vise-president that there shouldn't be a problem since the department as described, and confirmed over lunch with my prospective staff confirmed that they were truly not a SCM organization at all and were performing a modest RE function at best. 
 
After a few weeks of setting boundaries between my department and others in the firm, I went about establishing a mentoring program in the guise of weekly staff meetings. 
 
I was extremely gratified by the results, specifically the SCM/RE department gained much well-deserved credibility and respect from other primarily development teams, one of the staff attended every project staff/status meetings of which there were many. Not in a bureaucratic sense, simply because we developed many products. And I started the practice of developing installers at the start of a project rather than at the end to gain efficiency so that the installer was available for final acceptance testing the same time the product was. It was a major change for QA to test in parallel rather than in serial by waiting for the installer after functional testing was complete. 
 
And I learned much from the staff who could certainly master CDs and write installers than I even in the best of times. 
 
Finally, since the company developed software for computational chemistry and pharmaceutical discovery, my Chemistry undergrad was most valuable. I brought in a number of basic college textbooks, made them available to the staff as well as myself to assist or answer any questions they may have. The net result was an organization that had little technical credibility among the development groups gained a new respect and were able to follow a good deal of the more technical chemistry-related issues that were discussed during project meetings. 
 
All I can say is a huge YES to any type of mentoring program, even one as informal as the one I initiated. And apparently it becomes synergistic when the mentoring goes both ways in an unplanned and totally serendipitous manner.

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