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Mentoring For Tough Guys

Is it impossible to deal with people - and people issues - without declining into a terminal softness?  Sometimes, it seems so.  The counselling services spreading through Industry offer help for alcoholism, marital breakdown, stress--every sort of problem that makes it difficult for people to perform. 
But what about those who don't find it difficult to perform? Those already delivering near, or at, the top of the tree, who want to get better?  Do they have everything they need?

Christine Fitzpatrick thinks not.  Head of the Mentoring arm of consultants PJR Ltd., Fitzpatrick expresses a determination to reclaim mentoring from what she sees as the sentimental morass the counselling profession has dragged it into and put it back where it belongs - helping first class people on their way to the top to identify whatever may hold them back and remove it.

'Mentoring has become such a misused word,' she says.  'A little while ago, I met an ex-services man who told me he planned to be a mentor.  "Armed forces, leader of men, grey hair, bound to be good at it."  Well, I don't think so.  Outplacement companies, coaching companies, therapists - they all say they offer mentoring.  They probably believe it.'

But that isn't what Fitzpatrick means by mentoring and she advises anyone thinking of buying a mentoring service to be very clear about what it is that the person selling the service means.

What does mentoring mean to PJR? In Fitzpatrick's words: raising the ability of people with identified potential to deliver in support of operational goals.  Mentoring by this definition is not support for the walking wounded.  The approach works when mentors are almost part of the organisation, understanding corporate goals and working with the individual in that context. 

'It's fun, of course,' Fitzpatrick says.  'You're raising performance and raising capability, and the place you start from is that you're already dealing with very able people.  You're a catalyst for individual development, but working very much within the context of day-to-day reality.  Going on a course has its place, but the skills learned there may be difficult to apply in their work context--because of political influences, power struggles, the nature of the job or just because the thing you've been trained in isn't going on in your company at the moment. 

'Our work centres on what is going on for the client.  We have a long term agenda with the client, and that agenda varies enormously depending on who they are and what they are trying to achieve, but you walk in to every meeting with a clean sheet of paper, ready for whatever is going on for this client at this moment.'

What happens when the individual's agenda clashes with the company's agenda?  'My client is the organisation. It is not my role to persuade people not to leave.  It is my role to help them reflect on the options they were considering in a different way from that in which they might reflect themselves.  If they do leave, they should "leave well" - without causing damage.'

Most organisations are trying to achieve today's goals through the efforts of a team that is the ten, twenty or even thirty year product of what used to be. Mentoring is about focusing on what is now.  An individual mentoring relationship may last for six weeks and it may last three years, but it is a structured process with a beginning, a middle and an end.  The majority of PJR's people (Fitzpatrick uses the word "people" a lot - not unreasonably, she hates "mentee") stay with them between 18 and 24 months. 

During that time, the mentor builds awareness of how people are in relation to others, what is important and how they are at using resources to achieve the goals that really matter - as with the rest of us, the most important goals are frequently not the most immediately pressing. The hardest thing for people may be to stop doing what is no longer relevant.

And counselling?

'It has its place,' Fitzpatrick concedes. 'But I wish they wouldn't call it mentoring.'