Resources on the crucial topic of mentoring

After my blog post of 27 October 2011, I’m happy to see that Deborah Corn of PrintMediaCentr is dedicating a blog series to the incredibly important topic of professional mentorship, in this case from a printing-industry perspective. http://vicg8hr.blogspot.ca/2011/10/please-share-your-experiences-regarding.html

In the first installment, Chris Echevarria, Customer Experience Center Manager at Océ North America, outlines her experience with a formally instituted corporate mentorship program and such basic mechanics as how many mentors to have at once (she says several are feasible) and how often to contact them (at least once each quarter works for her).  http://printmediacentr.com/who-needs-a-mentor/

In case the importance of mentoring hasn't crossed your radar screen, an on-line blurb for David Clutterbuck’s 2004 book Everyone Needs a Mentor: Fostering Talent in Your Organisation spells out just how essential it is:  “Mentoring is the most cost efficient and sustainable method of fostering and developing talent within your organisation. Talented employees can be stretched to perform even better by exposure to high performing colleagues. Experience can be passed on more effectively one-to-one. Employees from groups that are under-represented in the organisation can be supported and developed by talking to others who have overcome similar barriers.”  http://books.google.ca/books/about/Everyone_Needs_a_Mentor.html?id=4OYegB6lbQAC&redir_esc=y

The many other practical resources on mentoring available on the Internet include:

1. Kristin Burnham’s 2011 article for CIO, examining why women aren’t reaching their full potential through mentorship and offering tips on how they can find and initiate fruitful mentoring relationships. http://www.cio.com/article/692472/LinkedIn_Tip_Why_You_Need_a_Mentor_and_How_to_Find_One

2. Amy Barrett’s 2007 article for BloombergBusinessweek Magazine on Why You Need A Mentor:  http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-02-25/why-you-need-a-mentor

3.    Reg Pirie’s 2000 take on the nature of an effective mentoring relationship for CanadaOne:  http://www.canadaone.com/ezine/aug00/mentors.html

4.  I’ve also posted a few of the many printed and e-books available on this important topic to the Reading List on my LinkedIn Profile at:  http://www.ca.linkedin.com/in/vicg8                     

New study says women make better bosses

     According to a new study from Spain, employees think women are better bosses than men. 

     Reasons cited include that women managers tend to instigate more individualized employee feedback, more democratic decision-making, and more workplace channels for interpersonal communication.  The study’s author, Eduardo Melero, an economist and business professor at the Universidad Carlos III De Madrid, said in a statement:  “Women managers seem to be more inclined to use these types of practices, individually, as well as promoting them among the rest of the management team.  And as such, a management team with more women could be more effective.”

     Increased communication between management and employees could well yield such important benefits as enabling the company to make more well-informed decisions based on employee feedback and improving morale among staff who will feel their contributions matter more if management listens to their opinions.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/men-vs-women-managers
http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/2241-women-bosses.html

Growing problem of workplace rudeness exacts hefty economic toll

A recent survey by Robert Half International, the world's largest specialized staffing firm, asked employees to recount the "worst or wackiest" episodes of rudeness they've witnessed colleagues commit in the workplace. Respondents reported a long list of atrocities, everything from office temper tantrums, to texting or answering cell-phone calls during meetings, to grooming in public, to stealing food from the communal fridge.

Although workplace incivility is an under-reported problem, it’s on the rise, according to Lew Bayer, president and CEO of Civility Experts Worldwide of Winnipeg, Manitoba, who comments:  “Many of us have become so accustomed to it, in fact, that boorish behaviour in the workplace goes by unnoticed, or doesn't even seem that rude any more.”

"Our research shows that people are so tired and busy and stressed that they're picking their battles when it comes to rudeness," says Bayer. "They might not say anything about sloppy dress or bad breath, but take a stand about rudeness that shows disrespect for time or for property -- wasting paper, keeping people waiting, spending 40 minutes in a meeting that should've taken 15, borrowing things without asking, returning items in a state of disrepair, using someone else's intellectual property."

In their book The Cost of Bad Behavior: How Incivility Is Damaging Your Business and What To Do About It (2009), American business professors Christine Pearson and Christine Porath say the problem of workplace incivility has been compounded by North America’s increasing tolerance of rude behaviour.  A decade of research led them to conclude that petty incidences of workplace rudeness are exacting a "staggering economic toll," but that few business leaders know how to tackle the problem.  They write that people who experienced incivility "intentionally lowered their productivity, cut back work hours, lost respect for their bosses, put in minimal acceptable effort, and sometimes even left their jobs -- all because of disrespectful words or deeds."

Their book cites a 2005 Gallup poll in which 95 percent of American workers reported experiencing incivility from co-workers.  And although Canadians enjoy a global reputation for superior politeness, Pearson and Porath found that the bad workplace manners reported by Canadians were even worse:  fully 99 percent of white-collar Canuck employees said they had witnessed incivility at work. One in four reported being exposed to it daily.

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/miss--manners-134657433.html

Please share your experiences regarding mentors for women

It’s encouraging to see that my posting yesterday prompted a dribble of renewed activity on a LinkedIn discussion on female mentors that I launched in Oct 2010.  The platform is an interesting and fun group called Girls Who Print, moderated by Mary Beth Smith of Texas.  To bring you up to speed, I’ve quoted how I began the discussion below:

   

Wanted: Girl success stories

 Does anyone have career-advancement stories with female heroines to share? Or female survival tactics for the recession or glass ceilings?

I’ve just finished reading through all 268 interesting entries posted to Mary Beth’s “And you are… ??" discussion since she launched it in May 2009. Back then she wrote: “Who knew guys would accept an invite to something called “Girls Who Print”??!!

Similarly, it was no surprise to me when I first joined Girls Who Print that my female publisher, Sara Young, was already a member. But it also turns out that my (male) editor at PrintAction, Jon Robinson, is a closet feminist: when editing my [Sept 2010] column (see https://www.box.net/shared/15ln6t43jf), Jon didn't just tolerate my long account of how Ms. Kris Bovay rose through the ranks to become chair of BIA; he even agreed with me that female professionals need to read more of that kind of stuff. Kris has forged an impressive career, although both her family responsibilities and the recent recession required her to change course radically. I hope the widespread supporters of Girls Who Print will exploit this space to share other, uniquely female, path-to-success stories.

Journalist, Chris Matthews (a male whose beat is politics), wrote: “It’s hard getting somewhere without a map. It’s the same reason so many of us love biographies. They show us how others have gotten where we want to go. If you want to get somewhere, study the routes others have taken.”

That goes double for women. Practitioners and theorists agree that in order to succeed professional women need to form the same kind of mentoring relationships that have enabled their male counterparts to advance. But studies show that women in corporate settings have often found mentoring relationships with other women unsatisfying: senior women report feeling either unqualified, discounted, or overburdened as mentors, while junior women complain that senior women are unreceptive or competitive in dealing with them as protégés.

I’m betting that this forum could turn out to be the missing antidote.

To review or make subsequent contributions to this discussion, please refer to the following link:

http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=1969742&type=member&item=31566959&qid=846c47d6-8aab-428d-9304-1cbf6507f12d&trk=group_most_popular-0-b-ttl&goback=%2Egdr_1319731197620_1%2Egmp_1969742%2Eamf_1969742_41605696%2Egmp_1969742

Here’s hoping not only that more conversation will ensue on line about the important topic of mentoring females, but also that it will somehow yield concrete practical benefits for professional women. 

Manager Know Thyself

Last spring, after “The New York Observer” posted its congratulations to a big-time TV producer on her retirement and plans to launch a 2^nd career as a guidance counsellor, they received over 200 comments on line.  Most came from her former employees, claiming the story was bogus and that she was a “foul-mouthed, cliquish bully”, to quote “Psychology Today” reporter Carlin Flora.

Flora reports:  “In his new book, “Good Boss, Bad Boss:  How to Be the Best … and Learn from the Worst,” Robert Sutton, Ph.D., catalogs [the] disproportionate effect that managers have on well-being.  A meta-analysis found, for example, that ‘about 75 percent of the workforce reports that their immediate supervisor is the most stressful part of their job.’

"For the majority of managers, who presumably want to fall on the heart-attack-reducing side of the scale, Sutton shares a key insight:  Good bosses know themselves.  And yet, just being in power is a deterrent to self-awareness, making it especially difficult for leaders to correctly ascertain the impact their behaviors and policies have on their employees.  ‘It turns out that followers, peers, superiors, and customers consistently provide better information about a boss’s strengths, weaknesses, and quirks than the boss herself,’ Sutton writes.  …

“[He] suggests they consciously beak out of the power bubble by asking [these info sources] for direct input and feedback.”

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201010/earnings-and-yearnings-dear-leaders