The second key to an appreciative perspective on career planning lies outside the purview of career planning. This second key resides at the heart of what I have been illustrating in this section: focus on success. Training and education should always be viewed first and foremost as a reward and an acknowledgment of success. It should never be featured as a resource for remedial work. If an organization’s program of employee development gains this remedial reputation, then it ceases to be of much value to either the employees who need assistance or the employees who are already successful. An appreciative program of employee development will be face saving for those employees who do need remedial assistance, as well as a source of support and encouragement for those employees who are making full use of their distinctive competencies.
Strategy Five: Mentoring and Coaching
Many sources of learning exist for employees. They learn from their successes and failures in addressing daily problems and from formal training and education. They also learn from their one-on-one interactions with significant people in their life: family members, friends and those people with whom they work closely. Professional helpers are also available: therapist, pastors, counselors, and consultants. In recent years, many employees have turned to mentors and coaches for assistance in meeting the complex, unpredictable and turbulent challenges of 21st Century organizational life.
In considering ways in which an organization can foster employee development through mentoring and coaching, I differentiate between the informal assistance that is provided by colleagues to one another on a daily basis and the skilled mentoring and coaching services provided to employees as part of a formal HRD program. Informal services may consist of nothing more than the caring assistance which one colleague provides to another colleague: a look of encouragement during a particularly difficult meeting or a few words of advice prior to difficult confrontation with a subordinate. While organizational leaders and human resource managers can’t mandate this type of assistance, they can help to create a supportive and appreciative culture in their organization that fosters interpersonal care. They can also help to formalize this support through the creation of peer-based mentoring and coaching program.
The mentoring of younger employees by older employees certainly is not a new idea. Mentoring played a central role in the apprenticeship programs of the craft guilds during the pre-industrial and early industrial eras. Today, mentoring can take many forms. First, it can be used not only in the establishment of a formal helping relationship between older and younger employees, but also in the formation of helping relationships among peers, especially when one of the peers is engaged in a major career transition.
