Teach your people well.

• Author: Roesler, Deborah
• Position: Employee development

As a service company that considers employees our biggest asset, we constantly look for opportunities to help our employees meet their personal and professional development goals. To determine whether a mentor program would further that goal, we began a formal pilot mentoring program a year ago with 25 mentor/"mentee" pairs.

Our mentors had to be at least on the managing director level, and we paired them with vice presidents or assistant vice presidents. Some of the pairs were: the investment services director and the firm accounting tax manager; the sales and marketing manager and the financial reporting and systems manager; the human resources director and the compliance director; the CEO and the fixed income sales manager; and myself (CFO) and the manager of branch services.

We launched our program with support from company leadership and with agreement on our objectives: to foster cross-functional communication, to encourage diversity of thought and style, to communicate key values and core behaviors of our company culture and to support the professional growth and development of our workforce.

Under the program, we expected mentor/mentee pairs to meet regularly. We asked each pair to develop a written working agreement and asked mentees to keep a journal to document progress. We also built in a mechanism to help the mentees network among themselves, hosting business card exchanges and similar activities to get better acquainted.

The program met our objectives and, with some changes, it will be a valuable mechanism for encouraging our employees' professional growth. And as mentors, we also learned a great deal that we can apply toward understanding employees' needs better.

I found that mentoring requires very little preparation on the mentor's part. The problems less experienced employees face are often the very same ones we've handled during our own careers. In many instances, sharing our experiences and what we'd learned was exactly the help our mentees needed.

For example, one mentee was in the midst of dealing with an employee's performance problems and working to fill a vacant position. "I don't know where to start," she said. She and her mentor sorted out the issues in each case, reviewed the resources she could tap for help and talked through steps she could take to move toward solutions. Together they were able to get a handle on both challenges and help the mentee find ways to deal with them.

Mentors also learned from mentees...