Mentoring a stimulant for Australia's IT staff

By Vivienne Fisher, ZDNet Australia, 25 February, 2002 17:39

NEWS

Getting staff who have been working in isolation to learn to manage can be tough, but some Australian IT departments are now turning to mentoring to bridge the gap. Alex Knight, manager of IT at recruitment consultancy Robert Walters, sees the business benefits. "If you look at the way the dot-com boom created an upsurge in the way people worked together we saw senior people taking on board grads into a very flat structure," he said. Although Knight admits that it could also be argued that the organisational structure of many dot-coms was fairly chaotic, he believes there are lessons to be learnt from the upstream and downstream mentoring they fostered. "It created a fantastic working atmosphere for the people who came out of the dot-com boom -- they were taught ways to navigate themselves through the Web and a more big business profile." He also points to a mix of both technical and career mentoring as particularly viable for an IT environment. These organisations use senior staff from within the business, rather than from the HR department, to work with more junior employees. "I don't think there's enough of it...there's your techie guys cutting code in the back office with your business leaders three or four floors away," Knight said. Although he concedes there is also often a necessity for this, he believes businesses get more committed staff from greater guidance and more involvement. "When people get the training they require they get the stimulant they need to stay within the organisation -- people leave because they're not stimulated in the job they have." Graham Clinch is a corporate psychologist in Australia who works companies through running their businesses and looking after staff. Clinch believes mentoring is one of the greatest things which can happen to a person in their overall career. "It can help a person develop their own thinking and planning," he said. "It's not just a short-term, where's the next job or payrise going to come from." Because it's built on trust between the mentor and the mentoree, Clinch sees it as a longer-term relationship. It's also something he believes is particularly relevant to IT departments, because the staff can sometimes be so specialised that they can lose perspective of the full picture of what the business is all about. As to the benefits, Clinch said it can help the person being mentored get on top of things in a way which would never occur to them if they didn't have a mentor. "A key ingredient is trust between mentor and mentoree -- because both parties reveal a lot about their strengths and weaknesses." Although it is sometimes argued that mentoring benefits the person who then take their skills elsewhere, Clinch believes that the business also gains from the mentoring process. Generally the mentor and mentoree will meet about once a month, talking through difficulties being experienced and how to understand the culture and politics of the organisation. Another advocate of the mentoring process is Alfred Chown, principal at executive search company E.L Consult in Hong Kong. Chown says mentoring offers a way of teaching staff more than just technical skills. He cites managing people; dealing with the commercial environment; and managing logistical problems as some of the benefits. "Because you want them to develop and handle bigger and bigger roles, anything like mentoring is a positive thing to do for employees." In addition to mentoring provided by more senior staff within an organisation, Chown said that some companies also opt to use outside mentors who have more general experience in the businesss world.

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