Wanted: HR mentors to support SMEs

Professional SME Mentoring

I am all in favour of mentoring schemes for organisations of any size. I also applaud any scheme for SMEs to access very specific professional advice that they may not otherwise afford. But I would be very wary of encouraging enthusiastic ‘mentors’ more widely at no fee to their client.

To declare my own background, I have been involved in helping to set up many business mentor schemes for SMEs professionally over the past 20+ years; first when I was a founding Director of a large Training & Enterprise Council, and subsequently more widely on behalf of the then DTI Small Business Service and many Business Links. There are some important lessons to be learned.

First, external mentoring can be a truly valuable, but accreditation inevitably becomes a significant issue when promoted by any formal public body. This often becomes a very time consuming and expensive matter for all as every local body involved seeks to promote their own preferred standards, often against inconsistent yard-sticks and parochial biases. ( And that is despite endless efforts in the last 20 years to provide one nationwide standard – not the least because there is so little agreement of what that the standard should be, shorn of both local vested interests and professional jealousies, and who should fund it.)

Secondly, both because of and despite the above, I observe there is already a vast over-supply of broader skilled and professional mentoring skills, across almost every conceivable business area. (Their best ‘accreditation standard’ may well be whether they can still offer their services at fees their clients continue to feel offer added-value at a level both can afford. They won’t last long otherwise!)
I suspect many of these providers were attracted to enter this market due to earlier redundancy, thanks to previous grant-aided support regimes, many of which may have offered them ready-made clients. But no longer?
Encouraging additional providers for free with ‘part-time well-wishers’, where there is already huge downward pricing pressures on this over-supplied free-lance market (most especially in HR), may therefore do no favours either for those who have already invested in this role, or for newly-redundant managers who think they may have something useful to offer the wider market.

Thirdly, there is no doubt in my experience that all successful mentors need training. They need to leave their egos at the door, their past successes and failures behind, and acquire many more professional business and customer-focused skills that their previous management roles may never have required. And that takes quite a lot of readjustment, humility and self-awareness that only comes from experience.
That could be a great development role for any sponsored employees, but they do need to be careful not engage where they may not be suitably qualified.

One Response

Jeremy Thorn says:

July 5, 2011 at 4:27 pm

Professional SME Mentoring

I am all in favour of mentoring schemes for organisations of any size. I also applaud any scheme for SMEs to access very specific professional advice that they may not otherwise afford. But I would be very wary of encouraging enthusiastic ‘mentors’ more widely at no fee to their client.

To declare my own background, I have been involved in helping to set up many business mentor schemes for SMEs professionally over the past 20+ years; first when I was a founding Director of a large Training & Enterprise Council, and subsequently more widely on behalf of the then DTI Small Business Service and many Business Links. There are some important lessons to be learned.

First, external mentoring can be a truly valuable, but accreditation inevitably becomes a significant issue when promoted by any formal public body. This often becomes a very time consuming and expensive matter for all as every local body involved seeks to promote their own preferred standards, often against inconsistent yard-sticks and parochial biases. ( And that is despite endless efforts in the last 20 years to provide one nationwide standard – not the least because there is so little agreement of what that the standard should be, shorn of both local vested interests and professional jealousies, and who should fund it.)

Secondly, both because of and despite the above, I observe there is already a vast over-supply of broader skilled and professional mentoring skills, across almost every conceivable business area. (Their best ‘accreditation standard’ may well be whether they can still offer their services at fees their clients continue to feel offer added-value at a level both can afford. They won’t last long otherwise!)
I suspect many of these providers were attracted to enter this market due to earlier redundancy, thanks to previous grant-aided support regimes, many of which may have offered them ready-made clients. But no longer?
Encouraging additional providers for free with ‘part-time well-wishers’, where there is already huge downward pricing pressures on this over-supplied free-lance market (most especially in HR), may therefore do no favours either for those who have already invested in this role, or for newly-redundant managers who think they may have something useful to offer the wider market.

Thirdly, there is no doubt in my experience that all successful mentors need training. They need to leave their egos at the door, their past successes and failures behind, and acquire many more professional business and customer-focused skills that their previous management roles may never have required. And that takes quite a lot of readjustment, humility and self-awareness that only comes from experience.
That could be a great development role for any sponsored employees, but they do need to be careful not engage where they may not be suitably qualified.