Sunday, July 25, 2010

Mentoring Pitfall- No-1 --------Mismatch of mentor pairs

Organisations does not advertise  their failures. organisations always talk of best practice not best failure.One of the main reasons were organisational mentoring  system fail is improper mentoring pairing, . In order to blindly benchmark certain practices I have seen organisation  introduce mentoring scheme in the morning and wound up in the  evening. 

Many organisations has introduced Mentoring system in its sincere attempt to minimize the learning curve for the new entrants. Many a mentoring pairs are formed without proper home  work by the HR department. If the mentoring pairs (mentor and men tee)are  not assessed for matching , the improper mentoring pair works like a virus in the system and this leads to the collapse of the mentoring system.

A leading manufacturing organisation uses DISC (Dominant ,Influence, Steady, Compliance) psychological test to match the mentoring pair (before its formation and formal training)DISC is the four quadrant behavioral model based on the work of William Moulton Marston PhD (1893–1947) to examine the behavior of individuals in their environment or within a specific situation (otherwise known as environment). It therefore focuses on the styles and preferences of such behavior.According to this school There are  two types of behavior 1)Task fcoused behaviour 2) Relationship Focused behavior. I generally use the following clipping in my mentoring training Programme, to drive home this points.

This is clipping from Hindi Move "Munnabahi MBBS " a scene were Hari prasad Sharam (Sunill dutt) a relationship focused person looks for relationship. and Dr Asthana (Booman Irani) looks at the task focus.





Affter seeing the clipping Could you please tell me  who can mentor whom ? who can become  mentor to whom? Can Dr Asthan mentor Hari prasad or vice versa?

3 comments:

  1. It is very right to get the mentor having same style as of the mentee so that the mentee can gain more and more from the mentor in his/her initial period of his/her career.

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  2. thanks for the interest shown in understanding the mentoring relationship
    Dr Sunderam

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  3. that is true sir,becoz some times we find people with different mentalities which are infact contrasting to us.it is important to select a right mentee by a mentor and vice versa,becoz to complete a task successfully there should be mutual understanding between both of them and should be matching of ideas and opinions.so one should be careful in selection.

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