Why doesn’t mentoring seem to work?

Employers reflexively promote mentoring to cultivate diverse talent, but metrics have been scarce — until now.

Mentoring, mentoring, mentoring: it’s the first thing that employers and advocates propose when lamenting the dearth of women and ethnic minorities in the investment sphere (and every industry). Baby boomers were the first to fixate on mentoring as the silver bullet for retaining underrepresented professionals, as personal relationships in the workplace were assumed to deepen loyalty. Each successive generation has gravitated to mentoring, recasting it according to prevailing perceptions of career barriers.

And yet underrepresented people remain underrepresented. Is mentoring a mirage?

The real question is why there’s still a question. Jean Heath and Kellan Brown have some answers.

Heath is managing director and head of the asset manager network at Envestnet Inc. Brown is vice president of business development and strategic partnerships with Finance of America Reverse. They’ve each experienced mentoring from all angles — as mentors, mentees and now as engineers of mentoring programs at their respective workplaces.

The fatal flaw with mentoring, Heath and Brown said, is that it’s so commonly referenced that it has become almost meaningless. What is a mentor anyway? A career coach? A boss who takes time to listen to you? A confidant who lets you weep on their shoulder?

Because nobody really knows, there’s a wide-open opportunity to reinvent mentoring and get it right. Heath and Brown are doing just that, by centering mentoring around metrics and measurable results — the bull’s-eye that until now has been missing for the silver bullet.

“In order for it to be successful, it has to be structured and people need guidelines. It’s not just a once-a- month catch up on how things are going. You need a formal cadence of goals,” Heath said. Structure creates accountability, and it’s accountability that extracts results from mentoring — especially when senior leaders are accountable to each other. “You’re creating a culture, not just a program,” she said.

One of the most vexing aspects of mentoring is that big-picture measurements are hard to translate to daily workplace programs. One 2019 study found that 71% of workers with mentors anticipated sunny career prospects at their current workplace, compared to 47% without mentors. Nice to know, but not easy to use to build real-world programs that deliver specific results.

New research drills down to specifics. A Kansas State University study sorted three mentoring dynamics that are relevant to mentees in different ways. Role modeling, social interaction and career development each represent different types of mentoring with unique utility to employees … especially when mentoring is always focused on professional development. In fact, the study found that mentoring that’s mainly socializing is counterproductive and could even undermine retention.

That’s why the magic is in the match, Brown said. Mentoring confusion is perpetuated when senior leaders who have had meaningful but loosely defined mentoring experiences try to simply replicate their own haphazard history.

Change the game by first defining the goals for different types of mentoring relationships, then engineering matches designed to achieve those goals, Brown said. Mentoring needs to have a focus, whether that’s helping the mentee develop specific skills, translate high potential to high achievement, or network across the enterprise, she said.

Small workplaces can accomplish this manually; at Finance of America Reverse, Brown adopted a matchmaking platform that also tracks the activity and results of the mentor pairs. “Get the data on retention and turnover so you can see what works,” she said.

Matches need to be made and managed by a human resources professional who can also coach the mentors to master the very skill of mentoring, Heath added. And mentoring should be a discrete leadership skill infused into professional development training from the start. “If we want to encourage more women into the industry, we need mentors who are closer to their own ages,” she said.

Stories will naturally emerge from the metrics, Brown promised, especially as seasoned leaders see their own histories reflected in the patterns of mentoring models that work, and don’t. And with metrics as the context, personal experience can elevate to inspiration.

“Think about the people who have made the biggest impact in your life,” she said, and aim to replicate that long-lasting influence for others.