Mentoring and OJT

TeamOJT Tip of the Month for September, 2007

The mentor-mentee relationship used to be a partnership between a manager and a new hire. The experienced boss coached his rookie. When the newbie looked good, the boss looked better. Now, with managers stuck volleying emails, tackling expense-account systems and dodging high-velocity blame, time for teaching has evaporated. The HR answer to this void: the assigned-mentor program. (Elizabeth Holmes, Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, August 28, 2007)

Peter Capelli, professor of management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania calls the assigned-mentor system in corporations something that is "quick and dirty and cheap." Mentoring is little more than the old buddy system of OJT. And we all know that that kind of arrangement can do, and often does, more harm than good. Rarely does the person on the receiving end learn anything from the more senior person. The learning is mostly hit and miss, and results in bad habits, shortcuts that don't work, inefficiency, and errors. Clearly, corporations need to wake up and heed the painful lesson already learned by most of today's manufacturing companies - there is no "quick and dirty and cheap" fix when it comes to learning.

Mentoring, to be successful, needs to be carefully planned in advance and should be delivered via a structured method analogous to that used for structured OJT. A little time invested up-front on planning the mentoring process and content will pay huge dividends in the long run and take far less time than the current quick, dirty and cheap variety.

Human Performance Applications
Phone: (206) 447-0860
FAX: (206) 447-3410
E-mail: diane@teamojt.com