There’s a subtle and yet costly issue lurking within so many organisations, especially those going through restructures, downsizing or cost-cutting initiatives. It is that mature, experienced managers are leaving those organisations as a result of redundancy, threat of redundancy or simply fatigue with an organisational culture that appears to value short-term performance over people.
When workplace pressure and overload increase, the issue intensifies as successful, seasoned professionals decide that their work-life balance is no longer sustainable and choose early retirement. This is as true in treasury as it is in any other function.
Mentoring offers great potential as a way of providing support, guidance and appropriate assistance to more junior, less experienced managers
As mature treasurers leave, they take knowledge and wisdom with them that relates to their role, their company, their sector and their counterparties. It is therefore important that organisations find the means to transfer the knowledge, wisdom and skill of mature treasurers to more junior treasury staff in ways that are mutually beneficial for those involved.
Mentoring offers great potential as a way of providing support, guidance and appropriate assistance to more junior, less experienced managers. But it’s likely to be a glaring omission in your people and performance strategy, simply because the keys to success are not widely recognised.
Here are five great reasons why you should consider using mentoring within your treasury team:
For their position to be successful, mentors need a clear understanding of what mentoring is, and how they can be supported to do it. They also need clear guiding principles that will assist them throughout the life cycle of a relationship, not simply during the formation of one.
A relationship between a mentor and mentee is one of equality, and yet it has a natural bias towards, or emphasis on, the experience, beliefs and perspectives of the mentor. The responsibility for learning, progress and results rests with the mentee, while the objective of a mentor is solely to empower the mentee – to increase their resilience and ability to respond resourcefully to whatever life throws at them.
Ultimately, what the mentee chooses to do, learn or ignore from the mentoring is not the mentor’s business. In other words, while they will be naturally interested in the mentee’s actions and results, they are not personally invested in them.
It’s important that conversations are built on an adult-to-adult foundation, where both parties have an appropriate sense of the situation
Some results of mentoring can be identified or measured, while others cannot. This does not mean they are insignificant or less important – just that the mentor is less aware of them.
To illustrate the importance of the above principles, try reversing them. If we switch a single principle and make the mentor responsible for the learning and progress of the mentee, we increase the pressure on the mentor to feel ‘ownership’ of the mentee’s actions. This increases the mentor’s tendency to want to ‘manage’ mentee choices.
This is in direct conflict with the goal of empowering the mentee, as the mentor is actually withdrawing freedom from them.
The person being mentored also needs to know what will be expected of them. They should understand what to expect from their mentor and they should take ownership of the process, for example, scheduling meetings and following up between sessions.
Mentees also need to appreciate that their relationship with their mentor is not a ‘managing’ relationship. For example, the mentee takes responsibility for deciding goals for the relationship.
Furthermore, the mentee is responsible for the results of the mentoring (not the mentor). What mentees do as a result of the conversations is down to them.
The theme for the mentee is of both responsibility and empowerment. This is a useful counterbalance to a relationship where the mentor is often more senior than the mentee, which can result in a ‘manager/subordinate’ tone to the conversation. So it’s important that conversations are built on an adult-to-adult foundation, where both parties have an appropriate sense of the situation.
Successful mentoring requires skills that many experienced staff will already have. You need mentors who have the ability to:
Quite often managers are worried about mentoring others because they feel they might not have the appropriate conversational skills. These might include the ability to listen effectively during a conversation, ask simple, open questions, and build a rapport during discourse.
Giving skills and awareness training to mentors has multiple benefits. They can increase their understanding and conversational ability and gain the vital quality of confidence in their own ability to fulfil the role. To lessen pressure on busy managers, a multimedia approach to learning can help.
Learning can be offered in bite-sized chunks and via blended solutions.
These include lunchtime webinars; short, demonstration-type film clips; background reading, and classroom learning where possible. Building a central repository of materials also provides the opportunity to support mentee awareness, for example, by making the same/similar materials available.
Mentees who gain a lot from being mentored are more likely to offer to mentor others over time, and so a positive cycle is encouraged.
Mentoring schemes can fail or stagnate for several reasons. The most common reasons include:
Our modern workplace demands that we adopt creative solutions to emerging issues. The need for engagement, retention and development of talent is fundamental to any organisation’s ability to prosper.
While acknowledging the performers of the future, we must also value the wisdom and knowledge of the past.
Mentoring presents a mutually fulfilling opportunity for one individual to contribute to the ongoing success of another. A different perspective and outlook is needed, plus a fresh approach.
As Albert Einstein put it: “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”
Julie Starr is a coach, mentor, writer and speaker. She is the founder of Starr Consulting and author of The Mentoring Manual, The Coaching Manual and Brilliant Coaching, all by Prentice Hall
