Successful mentoring relationships can be a boon in both personal and professional life. You may have been mentored by a teacher at school who helped you understand different careers, or a sports coach who assisted you in building your teamwork skills, or even a colleague/manager at work who helped you identify your true areas of interest. These fundamental relationships helped determine or refine your passions and strengths.

While the purpose of mentoring may seem like a simple concept, it is surprising to know how beneficial mentoring relationships can be, especially in the workplace.

(This tutorial is part of our IT Leadership & Best Practices Guide. Use the right-hand menu to navigate.)

Why Workplace Mentoring?

According to Forbes,

• Almost all Fortune 500^® companies engage in active mentoring
• In fact, companies with under 5,000 employees have recorded a 200%-300% increase in interest in mentorship
• In 2019 and forward, mentoring-led approaches by leadership are perceived as smart investments

In the workplace, mentoring is an effective way to help people identify their true interests, practice time-management, and/or facilitate progression on their chosen career path. Moreover, strategically developing an individual’s talent not only contributes to the company’s growth and innovation, but also lets him/her succeed in their career and life goals.

In my opinion, mentoring adds value, irrespective of where you are in your career. We can all use help and guidance from those we trust. In fact, the mentoring cycle comes full circle when your mentees start passing on the lessons learned to their mentees.

How Does It Work?

Many young, up-and-coming leaders desire mentorship in the workplace. When you talk to great leaders and thriving individuals, you learn that behind their journey towards their goals, stands a mentor (or maybe a few) who helped them get there. If you’re lucky, you will find mentors who may last throughout your career. An effective mentor encourages the mentee to venture down a path that was otherwise closed or unknown, and achieve something they thought was unachievable, or never really thought about. Mentors inculcate habits or good practices that many-a-times stick with the mentee for the rest of his/her career.

In turn, learning to serve as a mentor is a personal and professional development experience, challenging you to reflect on your own actions and shortcomings over time.

Moreover, the mentors must share sincere, constructive feedback that outlines the benefit/outcomes and ensure the feedback is shaped in a way that suits the individual (for example, celebrate wins, correct quietly, etc.). Mentors need to keep in mind that whenever something goes wrong, they must encourage the mentee to analyze and fix it and learn from the experience. While such situations may lead to difficult conversations, these are imperative to the learning process.

As a mentor, I remember once one of my mentees and I spoke about the next steps in his career. A few weeks later, this person called me to let me know he was leaving the company, and why. He had quickly acted upon our conversation and made a move that was right for him. While he left my team and I was disappointed to lose a top performer, the role he selected has paid huge dividends for him professionally and filled multiple skill gaps. We continue to talk frequently and provide each other advice.

In another scenario, an individual and I spoke regularly and he shared that he was tired of doing the same job and felt bored in his role. We discussed his true passion and the type of work he wanted to do. While it took time and we had multiple conversations, he eventually found the right role and today, has taken on significantly more responsibility. Sometimes your role as a mentor is just to listen and let your mentee work through the process on their own. In this case, patience won over making a short-term decision simply to change roles.

As a mentee myself, I have been lucky to have multiple mentors in my career, who have helped me identify my strengths and weaknesses. Each has provided me with sage advice that has impacted me both professionally and personally. Each of my mentors has challenged me to step outside of my comfort zone and take calculated risks. Without their guidance, I would not have achieved what I have, nor been able to serve as a mentor to others.

But Does Mentoring Really Matter That Much?

Mentors can help mentees learn the culture of the company and develop relationships across the group. For new employees, these difference-makers can prove to be a crucial resource during their learning curve. Given that mentors have the experience and battle-scars young employees have not yet cultivated, they can very well come up with concrete strategies and decision logic to educate and enrich others.

Mentoring significantly improves employee retention as mentees feel more engaged, leading to a happier and more committed workforce. Most importantly, it helps the company identify future leaders at an early stage.

Once you have cultivated your employees into key, confident, sought-after team players, it is easier to transition them in larger, more strategic positions.

When an employee feels like they have had time invested in them, they will be more likely to invest their time back in the company. The more engagement and investment employees have in a company, the more likely it is that they will stay with the company longer.

Relationship building requires time, but mentor/mentee interactions are some of the best times at the workplace and often the highlight of your day—or career!

Read this another interesting post from Mike – ‘The Center of Excellence: Necessity or Fad?’, to understand how many organizations are establishing corporate Centers of Excellence (CoE) to provide best practices and drive innovation.’

Business transformation is a prime focus for companies today, to improve agility, drive successful customer engagement, enable innovation and scale, and deal with disruption. In a recent report by KPMG, 93 percent (93%) of surveyed companies are undergoing or have recently completed business transformation initiatives, and those companies experienced, on average, an 8 percent (8%) surge in profit.

While the words “business transformation” are often thrown around loosely, the challenges presented by transformation initiatives are often difficult to overcome. To address those challenges and offer potential solutions, many organizations are establishing corporate Centers of Excellence (CoE) to provide best practices and drive innovation within the organization.

A PreSales Centre of Excellence can focus on identifying best practices from the existing knowledge base, scaling them up for the wider audience and standardizing them to ensure their conformity and consistency of usage. Standardization ensures the uniformity of messaging across the organization, and, as a result, enhances the customer experience. Interestingly, this standardization also acts as a foundation for further innovation which percolates down the organization. A CoE, as a whole, thus acts as a catalyst for organization-wide innovation.

A good example of a PreSales COE is the “Innovation Community” formed by the PreSales team at Capgemini. This community focuses on forming extended relationships and collaborative communities, internally and externally, building an ecosystem of experts that can be mobilized quickly in response to client needs. They have a flexible and truly agile engagement process that does not expect clients to follow the usual rigid sales/presales process that, instead, aligns with the clients’ buying process. In this way, this team inspires organizational stakeholders, innovates new business models, and implements new and disruptive technologies.

However, a common perception still prevails that a Center of Excellence is an organization established solely to improve people, process, and technology, based on a desired outcome. Is this idea just another fad, or is a Center of Excellence truly necessary to improve the complex business initiatives within organizations? Is it a value-add, or a buzzword that organizations are responding to out of a need for greater guidance?

What is a Center of Excellence?

According to Gartner, a CoE is “a physical or virtual center of knowledge concentrating existing expertise and resources in a discipline or capability to attain and sustain world-class performance and value.”

Essentially, the CoE is a discipline that builds expertise and knowledge to drive tangible business results. Furthermore, Centers of Excellence do not just enable—they create and scale innovation. The CoE leverages processes and standards to innovate throughout the customer engagement lifecycle.

How does a CoE add to the growth of an enterprise?

When creating a Center of Excellence, one of the prime objectives is to identify best practices across the organization. This allows you to leverage an existing knowledge base, reducing development time and providing a platform for further innovation and scale. The concept behind building a CoE is typically based on a technology, an application, or even a critical process.

Also, when it comes to mindset, leadership, and tools, Sales/PreSales teams either already have the data that can drive experiences that customers expect, or they engage with the potential clients or existing customers to understand and set the right expectations. A CoE helps in making interactions seamless by sharing insights on customers’ existing state, future state, industry benchmarks, and offers clarity across the company. This maximizes the customers’ lifetime value and builds a strong partnership between the two organizations.

For example, the PreSales Centre of Excellence at BMC facilitates optimal customer engagement. The team focuses on the earliest possible engagement in the sales cycle, starting with strategic account planning that is followed by customer-aligned engagement. This is driven by creating customer-specific deliverables that help clients understand how BMC solutions can provide value-add to their processes and assist them in tackling business challenges. By leveraging engagement excellence, PreSales COE helps identifying best practices, standardizing them and spreading them across the PreSales organization. The team also innovates new ways of addressing challenges faced in the field, and proactively develops solutions (new deliverable types, processes, benchmarks, industry trends, etc.) to be shared with the wider audience.

Conclusion

A Center of Excellence, therefore, is far from just a fad. Instead, it has become a pillar for success. A well-established CoE that is focused on how to consistently innovate and scale enhances the customer experience throughout the engagement lifecycle. Optimally, a CoE can contribute to a company’s brand image and reputation, increasing its competitive advantage.

At the end of the day, even for a CoE, all that matters is the impact on business excellence. Because, as Earl Nightingale would put it, “Excellence always sells.”