Mentoring a New Generation of Winners for Industry
By Christopher Ward

Outgoing Welsh Rugby Union Chief Executive David Moffett has offered us many insights on strategy and management during his three year tenure in the job.

One of the most recent was his assertion that star centre Gavin Henson needed a “strong mentor” in order to fulfill his outstanding potential on the international scene.

Reflecting on this I would argue that the same could be said of tens of thousands of “star” managers within Welsh industry who have the potential to turn the nation’s economy into a serious world contender.

Quite simply we have two major reservoirs of talent within Welsh business and it’s vital we bring them together to achieve the sort of performance levels needed to match the intensifying global competition. 

These reservoirs comprise, on one hand, the large numbers of accomplished managers and leaders who have delivered outstanding results over the years, and, on the other hand, the rising stars within companies of all sizes who have the talent to follow in their footsteps.

Creating individual and effective relationships between members of these two groups is a pressing priority for everyone committed to improving management and leadership performance in Wales.

In short we need to create an army of effective mentors and cultivate a pool of up and coming managers willing to be mentored.

Depending on circumstances and resources, these mentors may come from within companies or from outside. They can result from private consultancy arrangements or from networking between large and small companies.

The reality is that every manager and leader in industry probably uses someone as an unofficial sounding board already, in order to get a second opinion on the workplace situations they face.

This sort of relationship needs to be escalated into a proper structured mentoring arrangement to ensure emerging managers obtain the full benefit of the more experienced person’s knowledge, expertise and judgment. 

To make mentoring work throughout Welsh industry we need to understand what it really is and ensure that those taking part are clear about the ground rules.

According to international expert on mentoring Professor David Clutterbuck, who will be speaking at Ewloe in Flintshire on November 2, true mentoring is a two-way learning relationship which helps people to grow.

It is not like Big Brother or Sister telling younger siblings what to do and then observing performance giving them marks out of ten. Neither does it involve becoming a kind of champion for the cause of the mentored manager, as often happens in the USA.

It has much more to do with stimulating thinking that helps the less experienced manager to search for and find the right answers and develop a habit and aptitude for doing this.

One thing it is not, is a process of the experienced manager churning out clones of him or herself.

Sir Alex Ferguson found this strategy back-fired when he tried to mould David Beckham in his image and the star midfielder finally turned against him.

In fairness though Sir Alex was Beckham’s manager rather than his mentor – a different relationship. In fact if the player had had a mentor he might have been better able to cope with Manchester United’s notoriously forceful manager.

According to David Clutterbuck, a breakdown in the relationship resulting from mentors trying to create clones of themselves occurs in around one third of all such situations. On the other hand, where both parties understand what they want to achieve at the outset, the success rate has been assessed at around 90%.

Mentoring is not a mysterious dark art but a very straightforward system for creating a continuing conversation that enables one person to contribute to another person making major transitions in knowledge, thinking and performance.

The skill of the mentor is in managing that dialogue, which incidentally doesn’t necessarily require frequent face-to-face meetings if that isn’t practical. Successful mentoring has taken place over long periods by phone or even email.

According to the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development around 78% of the Top 1,000 companies in the UK now make use of mentoring in some form or other.

Strangely Wales, where current mentoring models were pioneered over 20 years ago, hasn’t, for some reason, embraced this method of people development as readily as other parts of the UK.

However our need for this kind of input is as great, if not greater than other areas.

We have a manufacturing industry in rapid transition which needs its managers to be operating at peak performance and we have an economy populated by smaller companies which need to punch above their weight in the international economy in order to survive and thrive in the coming decade.

The Assembly Government, the WDA and ELWa have all accepted in principle that mentoring should be a key element in the drive for stronger, better performing businesses.

Mentoring is a low cost, high impact, investment in people that can make a real difference to the economic success of Wales and it represents a highly effective use of the resources we already have.

However there is an urgency about this and it’s important that we move ahead with some speed to encourage experienced managers to become mentors and emerging managers to get involved in structured mentoring relationships.

It’s equally important that mentors receive training in how to draw out the talents of less experienced managers and avoid the pitfalls that can negate the whole exercise.

If we can get this element of our management and leadership development right we can take a giant step towards the vision of Wales as a small but clever nation achieving big success at home and abroad.

Christopher Ward is Chief Executive of Wales Management Council. For further information about mentoring or David Clutterbuck’s visit to North Wales log on to www.walesmanagementcouncil.org.uk