The Business Case
Mentoring impacts a number of important organizational initiatives. Here are just a few of the areas
- Click on each title line for a more complete explanation of each item.
The mentoring process has been shown to be one of the most efficient, natural, and cost-effective means of developing and retaining promising employees within a company. It is particularly well-suited to the requirements for life-long learning of working adults and for the adult learner.
Here are a few examples of how mentoring pairs delivering measurable Return-on-Investment.
- One of my shining examples of the outcome of mentoring was through an executive mentoring program held by a premier medical diagnostics firm. Together the mentee/mentor pair saved their company over three million dollars in contracts that would have been lost to a competitor. Talk about return-on-investment!
- In another firm, a mentee went to her mentor to ask for advice on choosing a vendor to create some specialized software for a high-end project. The mentor already had software in his department that could be readily adapted to the mentee’s project. The mentee not only saved the time and effort of searching for a vendor, she saved the $ 50,000 she had budgeted for the software development.
- In another instance in a well-known food services company, a mentee chose a peer to be her mentoring partner. Each was the head of a team and the teams needed to improve their collaborative efforts. Based on the dialogues between the mentee/mentor pair, the teams began to understand one another’s perspectives, gained greater respect for each other’s timelines and eventually began holding staff meetings together. While it is possible to compute the dollars saved by greater collaboration, it certainly made the work between the two teams much less stressful and more productive.