Facilitating Career Advancement Through Workplace Mentoring

Statement of Purpose

The purpose of this proposal is to design a company-wide professional mentoring program that provides informal vocational training intended to enable lower-level employees to learn from their superiors. More particularly, the mentoring program is intended to address specific areas of professional competence in which many lower-level employees have exhibited a relative deficiency, in a manner that does not overwhelm senior-level managers and executives or conflict with their respective professional responsibilities.

Scope of Proposal and Statement of Limitation

The scope of this proposal includes all areas of professional competence that relate to issues outside of direct, task-specific competence and professional training in operational responsibilities. The scope of this proposal is not directly related to technical competence in areas of professional operational matters that are mainly functions of professional qualifications for specific lower-level professional responsibilities.

This proposal is specifically limited to those elements of professional competence that arise in connection with customer relations, customer service, maintaining appropriate professional decorum consistent with company-wide culture, informal nuances that lie outside the scope of task-specific training, and appropriate adherence to chain-of-command expectations in relation to the presentation of input by lower-level employees.

Sources and Methodology

The sources used in connection with this proposal consist of peer-reviewed academic texts used in the traditional education of business professionals in advanced formal business management programs. The methodology consists of reviewing the available literature outlining the requirements of effective communication of business management principles and devising an approach to implementing and adapting those principles in the areas of professional competence that require improvement on a company-wide basis.

Selecting Candidates for Mentorship

Currently, the need for mentorship far exceeds the availability of suitable mentors, simply by virtue of the sheer number of lower-level employees who have already expressed their desire for mentorship. The most pervasive fundamental underlying goal of employee development training is to improve professional performance (Locker, 2000). Therefore, the relative scarcity of available mentors within the supervisory ranks suggests that the most productive and beneficial method of selecting lower-level employees for available mentorship relationships is based on current performance levels.

Specifically, within the larger group of those lower-level employees who have expressed the desire for mentorship, the most efficient use of available supervisory personnel supports structuring the mentoring program to incorporate current performance evaluations as the primary criterion for participation. Similarly, general principles of motivation in the vocational environment suggest that presenting the availability of mentoring as an earned privilege is most conducive to inspiring optimal job performance, as well as to appreciation on the part of mentorship candidates of their participation as a valuable opportunity (Myers & Spencer, 2004).

Currently, the existing responsibilities of supervisory employees are recognized as a potential obstacle to a company-wide mentorship program. In that regard, the overall interests of the company and its employees emphasize the requirement that any such program be devised in a manner that avoids detrimental effects on the professional performance of supervisory employees as a result of their mentoring responsibilities.

Balancing Professional Responsibilities of Mentors

A substantial body of literature suggests that overwhelming employees with additional responsibilities — especially when those added responsibilities fall outside the scope of their direct operational duties — is potentially detrimental to their performance output. That effect is even more pronounced when the specific additional responsibilities are not the result of voluntary autonomous choice but are instead presented as mandatory requirements (Locker, 2000).

Therefore, participation in the program on the part of available candidates to serve as mentors should incorporate some element of choice, even if complete non-involvement is not available as an option. On the other hand, principles of sound vocational psychology suggest that mandatory participation is necessary to minimize the potential for dissension between participants and non-participants arising from disparate contributions to the collective benefit of the organization (Myers & Spencer, 2004). This proposal acknowledges the inadvisability of implementing a mentoring program that could undermine morale among the supervisory ranks as a function of their degree of participation.

The proposed method of overcoming this potential issue is to present supervisory mentor candidates with a choice to participate directly in the mentorship program or indirectly. This approach to preventing an unfair burden on participants requires non-participants to relieve an appropriate amount of participants' conventional workload.

More particularly, this proposal recommends reducing the number of direct reports assigned to participating mentors and adding them to the number of reporting personnel supervised directly by non-participating upper-level employees. In principle, the idea is simply to reduce the workload of supervisory-level employees who choose to participate as mentors, as necessary to maintain their productivity and avoid resentment. The corresponding consequence of non-participation provides a natural incentive to choose to participate in the program in order to avoid the alternative increase in conventional professional responsibilities.