Innovative Mentoring Creating Innovation Within

Innovative Mentoring Creating innovation within jobs can be difficult in some career tracks. In government work, for instance, a person may have to work within rules that affect not only his or her department but the other departments affecting that person's work. Nevertheless, innovation can occur in an individual's work style. One place where managers can create change within a bureaucracy is in mentoring. Part of a manager's job is to train new employees in the department. This can be a perfunctory exercise with efficiency as its goal.

Such an approach will involve teaching the person the technical ropes. In government this can include learning how to apply complex regulations as well as learning how to work within regulatory restrictions that come from outside one's department. However, by adding an aspect of mentoring, it is possible to create a feeling of connection to one's department that can lead to increased job satisfaction for the new employee. It may also help keep valued employees within one's department instead of losing them to other branches of the government agency.

Many mentors and mentees prefer a formal mentoring arrangement, where a new employee is paired with a more advanced person at the executive or high managerial level. They set goals and have regular meetings. Often they do not work together during the day (Smith et. al., 2005). This is not always a practical solution in government, and there can be advantages to a manager taking a mentor relationship with new employees.

Some businesses have taken a more informal approach to mentoring, where the natural leaders take employees under their wing (Pielstick, 2002), but that also does not always work within highly structured bureaucracies. In the Department of Defense, the issues involved, for instance in generating contracts, is complex and the rules both complicated and essential. In such a situation, it may be important for new employees to be led by people in charge of the larger picture for a department.

One approach to such a situation could be to use mentoring to, as Heimann and Pittenger (2000) say, 'nurture the talents of younger subordinates." When looking at mentoring within a restricted population, such as one specific sub-department in a large bureaucracy like the Department of Defense, focusing on each new employee's talents can be tremendously valuable in the long run.

For instance, proofreading is often considered an entry-level skill, but when evaluating government contracts, the skill takes on new meaning: a misplaced decimal can end up costing the government millions of dollars. Spotting that employee who has the ability to spot finance-related errors and helping that person develop those skills can make the person a tremendous asset to his or her department.

Having a department head or leader mentor all new employees, however, seems to fly in the face of what most people think of as mentoring -- a one-on-one relationship that endures, possibly over years, with the mentor taking special interest in the progress of the mentee. However, some experts in the field have found that it is possible to mentor a group of employees (Kaye, 1999).

This makes the mentor more of a leader for training, but elevates training far beyond "Do this, do that, and bring it to me when you're done." Kaye (2002) makes an important point about mentoring: with the push to make businesses and government leaner, often there simply are not enough executives to go around to mentor all the candidates. A group approach can be one solution.

She suggests that those who will mentor people in groups need certain personal attributes, such as being comfortable working in groups, being able to get to the core issues of a problem quickly, and the kind of openness that always makes a good mentor -- the ability to connect with people on a personal as well as professional or intellectual level.

One difficulty with this approach is that it may be startling to employees who have experienced mentoring elsewhere and have a different perception of what mentoring should be (Perrewe & Young, 2004). However, establishing this group approach could be part of the mentoring and training process itself. While even in government it is important to have ties outside one's department, in complex contract work, a manager must rely on his or her employees to be able to work together as a team within that department.

Implementing such a mentoring problem has one advantage in that it does not have to be complicated. There is no need to search out mentors from other departments and find a way to identify appropriate mentor-mentee pairs. In addition, intra-departmental mentoring can help build a team approach to working on complex problems. Mentoring helps a person recognize that his or her contributions are important (Heimann & Pittenger, 2000), so mentoring, which broadens what would otherwise just be simple training of new employees, can result in a more efficient office.

All good mentoring result.