Intelligent Mentoring

Book excerpt: How to Use Mentoring to Drive Maximum Competitive Advantage Techniques and lessons from IBM’s world-class mentoring programs—for every business and HR leader, strategist, Chief Learning Officer, consultant, trainer, and scholar For today’s enterprises, few challenges are as daunting as preparing tomorrow’s leaders. Mentoring is one of the most powerful tools at their disposal. But not all mentoring programs are equally effective, and not all companies have learned how to sustain mentoring. One company has: IBM. Intelligent Mentoring reveals how IBM has done it–and offers specific guidance and best practices you can use to achieve equally powerful results. Intelligent Mentoring shows how IBM has fully integrated a diverse portfolio of formal mentoring initiatives into both talent development and innovation promotion. Whether you’re a business leader, strategist, Chief Learning Officer, training specialist, coach, or consultant, this book presents a state-of-the-art framework for making mentoring work. Drawing on IBM’s experience, the authors demonstrate how to build a diverse portfolio of effective mentoring programs...use mentoring to strengthen organizational intelligence...build sustainable communities of mentors and mentees...promote collaboration across differences... and above all, link mentoring to strategy and use it to sustain competitive advantage. • Use mentoring to develop tomorrow’s world-class business leaders Actionable solutions and best practices from IBM’s breakthrough mentoring program • Embrace mentoring as a high-performance work practice Maximizing, capturing, and communicating the value-added impact of mentoring • Set the right goals for mentoring: then achieve them Utilize mentoring to strengthen organizational learning, improve retention, promote innovation, and more • Use mentoring to solve your organization’s most “wicked” problems How mentoring can help you respond to complex, tangled challenges you’ve never faced before