Structured Mentoring Develops Worthy Successors

If the majority of staff in a single department is near or at retirement age, you are facing a dilemma. This is exactly what happened at Phalaborwa Mining Company's secretarial department. Most of their executive secretaries had, or would soon reach retirement age and the knowledge and experience gap between senior and junior secretaries was just too vast to ensure a smooth hand-over and transition.

Business Resource Development (BRD) implemented and managed a unique mentorship programme for these secretaries during 2011. We followed a six-pronged approach.

1. Firstly we had to identify the most successful senior secretaries and the skills, knowledge and attributes they possessed that made them so successful.
2. This information, together with comprehensive psychometric and skills assessments were used to evaluate all other secretaries against these benchmarks and to identify who the most likely immediate successors would be, but also at the same time develop all junior secretaries to narrow the existing skills gap.
3. Following this, we appointed the senior secretaries as mentors and, after extensive training of both mentors and mentees, we provided a structure for two-weekly mentoring sessions.
4. We simultaneously provided extensive skills training in conjunction with Linda Coetzee and Associates over a period of five months to both groups to ensure that the mentors and mentees had the same frame of reference to ensure successful reinforcement of the training in the workplace. This was concluded with a one-day team building workshop.
5. We conducted regular follow-up calls and face-to-face interviews to monitor the success of each of the mentor-mentee relationships and took corrective action where required. We also provided mentor-the-mentor sessions where practical guidance and support was given to individual mentors when they faced particular dilemmas.
6. The last part of the programme involved interviews with the managers of each of the secretaries to obtain their feedback and assessment of progress as it related to on-the-job performance.

We were blown away by the success of the programme and its unanticipated outcomes such as the formation of much stronger ties between senior and junior secretaries and the effortless dissolving of pre-existing cultural barriers. A new culture of skills transfer is now embedded amongst the secretaries and the bar on performance excellence was raised significantly.

The senior secretaries were clearly moved when, during the last day of the formal programme, mentees paid tribute to their mentors in the most creative of ways, including poems, speeches and even a Rap song, enthusiastically presented by a group of four mentees.

Phalaborwa Mining Company's secretaries after a bird-watching competition day on the Olifants River.