Mentors Make The Difference

Mentoring

Yet after centuries of practice, we’re still having to learn some hard lessons

 

Lonnie Emard

WITH JANUARY BEING National Mentoring Month, I wanted to talk a bit about mentoring and our work at Apprenticely. Just as apprenticeships have moved into new realms of the workforce, so too have mentorships. And it hasn’t happened without a few growing pains.

Mentoring is, of course, the age-old practice of an experienced master sharing their knowledge of the trade, whatever that might be. Sharing their understanding, technique, and experience with someone new. That’s mentoring, but it’s also the essence of apprenticeship.

When you think about learning in the classroom, it’s one thing to be taught; it’s another to be shown; it’s yet another to be observed. But the part that is generally missing in education is application—which includes being evaluated on the job, corrected, and reevaluated. That leads, eventually, to being confirmed that the apprentice has mastered the trade or craft. So education is part of the process, but the key piece is that experienced master taking the time necessary to help develop another person who is capable, confident, and, now, experienced.

I have been working with apprenticeships for nearly two decades now, and I can say unequivocally that you can have a great candidate and great training, but without a dedicated mentor—notice the word dedicated—apprenticeships have a much higher probability of failure. The data clearly shows that. Back when I first implemented apprenticeships at Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina, our natural tendency was to turn over mentorship to the person who was going to be nearby, maybe on the same team, and was probably the best expert, the best technician, the best at whatever that role was.

Unfortunately, two things happened. The person who’s best at the job is usually busier than others because he or she is carrying a lot of the load. And sometime the best technician may not be the best communicator, or may not care as much about seeing others succeed and grow, and may resent the extra burden.

So we at Apprenticely teach in our mentoring webinars that one of the most important aspects of a mentor is being available. Available and accessible. They also need to care about the job of mentorship. Sometimes people would say, “Well, when push came to shove, I did what I got paid for. So, that means I did what my objective said I was supposed to do and I just didn’t have time to do that mentoring.” But it’s not just individual tasks being completed that counts; knowledge sharing is a major form of contribution for a company. The fact that the mentor is sharing that expertise and knowledge with many others, much less one particular other apprentice, is a significant contribution and adds to overall company capability.

When we work with employers, we recommend that mentors should be evaluated on how well they’re doing their mentoring. The minute you make it a performance objective, the mentor does it, because otherwise it results in negative performance. So now it becomes an important part of their work activity tied to the guiding principle that it’s a major contribution to the company.

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NOW THAT WE have five years of apprentice data in Arkansas, another thing we’ve learned is that former apprentices often make excellent mentors. Having been apprentices themselves, they know what somebody new might need, and they know intangibles about the job and the workplace that are never spelled out in an HR handbook. In that way, the expert begins to impart knowledge upon that apprentice, and that’s how somebody learns to really be effective in their job and to make decisions.

On the other hand, in our first few years of placing apprentices with employers, we didn’t spend as much time on mentorship as we probably needed to. In extolling the benefits of apprenticeships to new sectors of the workforce, we talked about various mentoring principles and hoped that companies had been doing that already. Our data says that that wasn’t the case, for a variety of reasons. Small companies just don’t have the bandwidth. They were doing whatever they could to try to guide that new person, to give him or her the essentials to be effective. But, naturally, some companies did it better than others. As for larger companies, you’d think they would have plenty of bandwidth to be able to orchestrate effective mentoring. But the excuse ends up being, “Well, production got in the way. We were just too busy.” And what we’ve learned is that prioritization has to come down from top management, so that the people who have to implement mentorships know that it’s being valued—and observed just like every other measurement of success.

But the more we’ve offered education and training around how to be a good mentor, the situation has gotten much better. Apprenticely’s mentoring education and training is available to anyone who wants it, in several different ways. First of all, our project management team—with input from Dr. Don Walker, our training solutions director—solicited advice from many sources, both inside and outside Apprenticely, including from Walmart and First Orion and other companies that have done mentoring. They’ve found out what works and what doesn’t work, and they’ve packaged it up in a handbook that they can deliver to individuals who’ve been assigned as mentors [see accompanying article]. There’s also a Power Point presentation that we can give to new mentors, walking them through the things they’re going to need to know in order to be successful in this all-important role. Finally, there’s a monthly webinar. So as new companies hire new apprentices and assign new mentors, they might not make the first webinar. But knowing that it’s a regularly scheduled thing, they can attend one of them that fits their schedule.

I think the key element to an apprentice’s success is having to do the hands-on work, applying what they’ve learned in their training classes. When I say “hands on,” I know it’s relative to the kind of job they’re doing. It’s literally more hands-on in a manufacturing plant, and less so for knowledge workers. But the whole point is to be observed and to have a mentor help make adjustments and corrections.

Throughout my career as a coach, people would always say, “Practice makes perfect.” But I disagree. I believe that “practice makes permanent,” because what you practice is what you’ll create as a habit. And that habit may not be perfect. So, it’s very, very important to have a mentor observe an apprentice and say, “That isn’t quite the way we do it here,” or “You learned the theory, but that’s not the way it’s actually applied.” In providing that adjustment and that correction, the mentor helps the apprentice develop practices that can become both permanent and perfect.

The fact is, this is the way of the world. None of us is born knowing how to operate in various walks of life. Those of us who were lucky enough had someone ahead of us to share their expertise. When that doesn’t happen, it weakens overall performance and leads to mediocrity. But when it does happen, the world keeps advancing and individuals keep prospering. It’s a beautiful thing to be a part of.
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Lonnie Emard is Apprenticely’s National Apprenticeship Director.

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