MENTORS
You've just joined Acme Widgets, Inc., as assistant manager of widget development. You're only on a middle rung of the corporate ladder, but you have a plan that will get you to the top in no time. Your first step: to find a mentor.
Well, think again. Taking on a mentor may get you a racquetball partner, but it's not likely to make you corporate chieftain, says Southern Illinois University's Janice Joplin, Ph.D., after studying 91 managers and their bosses.
Mentoring, she found, had no relationship to a manager's abilities or Job satisfaction. Nor did it enhance supervisor judgments of promotability. And it may actually interfere with the acquisition of leadership abilities: Managers who'd had a mentor in mid-career showed lower vision and planning skills.
The problem, believes Joplin, may boil down to the time it takes to nurture mentor relationships. Developing corporate vision requires introspection and analysis--and that's hard when your social calendar is full. Companies considering a mentoring program should evaluate what they want from such a program, says Joplin. "If the goal is to foster leadership skills, there may be better ways to do it."
