Mentoring Goes Global

Mentoring Goes Global
Randy Emelo , 03-13-2011

The expansion into a global marketplace has revealed a weakness when it comes to filling leadership gaps and cultivating top talent: Organizations can’t grow enculturated leaders quickly enough to keep up with the demands of these emerging markets. Locally based employees possess an intuitive understanding of culture, local issues and the nuances of effective business practices needed for success in these markets, but they often lack the experiential depth and leadership qualities that would allow them to flourish as high potentials on the organizational level.

How can organizations take advantage of the homegrown talent available around the world and bring them into the fold of the larger company? Many multinational organizations have begun using a revolutionary approach to mentoring to address the issue.

Functioning as a symbolic water cooler to catalyze intentional learning relationships built on collaboration and rich dialogue, mentoring allows colleagues around the world to share cultural understanding, experiences, critical organizational knowledge and wisdom with each other.

Organizations are moving beyond simple language translations and briefings on cultural differences to actually leveraging cultural differences to increase creativity and effectiveness within their companies. The use of mentoring for supportive developmental relationships and intentional learning engagements offers a way for organizations to accomplish this.

Mentoring the Global Workforce
The learning solutions of tomorrow will emphasize global interconnectedness, dynamic and mobile approaches, flexibility and performance impact. To start down this path today, global organizations are looking for ways to address urgent learning needs by connecting workers with the people they need as resources, whether these people are peers, partners, formal mentors or even customers across their entire enterprise. A more networked view of mentoring opens the door to all of these possibilities.

Aon Corp., a global provider of risk management services, insurance and reinsurance brokerage, and human capital solutions and outsourcing, embodies this attitude. It offers mentoring to all of its more than 55,000 employees across 28 countries and supports participants in their quest to build connections and knowledge networks across countries.

“Enabling colleagues to work on career development and to be able to understand other cultures and backgrounds is very important to Aon,” said Linda Crisanti, manager of informal learning within Aon’s talent development department. Broadening people’s cultural knowledge and understanding plays a vital role in how Aon’s employees can assist their global clients.

An open-access program such as Aon’s allows for knowledge to be shared across the scope of the entire organization. By moving beyond highly controlled, geographically bound mentoring programs, participants enjoy an informal feel to their connections but still accomplish actual business-related goals while they learn cultural nuances in a relational manner.

Forward-leaning organizations have invested more resources in expanding their view of mentoring to encompass global learning connections for several reasons:
• Training budgets have shrunk over the past few years, and organizations need to leverage more internal talent and expertise rather than spend resources on formal training that can become quickly outdated.
• Globalization demands organizations help their employees connect to, understand and promote diverse views if they are to survive in the expanding marketplace.
• Social networking and the popularity of connecting with people online means there is a greater comfort level with meeting someone virtually and learning from them, even if those involved never meet face to face.

Progressive organizations know there is much value to be gained from investing in a global approach to mentoring.

Growing and Retaining Global Leaders
Chicago-based Northern Trust, a provider of investment management and asset administration, started as a local business in 1889 and has grown into a global powerhouse today. With 12,000 employees around the world, Northern Trust currently leverages mentoring for both career development and to support diversity and inclusion. Nearly 2,400 employees currently take part in the organization’s voluntary global mentoring program, such as members of its Women in Leadership Forum.

“We pride ourselves on being a relationship-driven organization,” said Michelle Hoskins, senior vice president and head of talent management at Northern Trust. “It wasn’t until we started using open mentoring and opening [the program] up globally that we’ve gotten to know talent that we wouldn’t have tapped into previously.”

Northern Trust is now able to identify and retain talent throughout the entire enterprise. “By virtue of opening up mentoring globally, it helped us to start thinking outside the box,” Hoskins said.
This led Northern Trust to look more closely at how deeply it digs for talent in the organizational hierarchy and helped it gain a better understanding of the bench strength it has for talent across the enterprise. “Mentoring has allowed us to develop more robust talent profiles, which inform the decision to buy versus build talent,” Hoskins said. “We are on a journey to educate and recognize those leaders who build talent for the organization, and mentoring can be an effective tool to measure success over time.”

Northern Trust sees mentoring playing a key role in accelerating its talent pipeline. For example, building that pipeline in India, where the average employee age is 23, looks vastly different from the talent pipeline it might build in London or Chicago, where the average employee age is 42. Mentoring is helping Northern Trust identify talent gaps and close them in real time and in turn accelerating its talent development and making it a more agile organization.

Unifying and Exchanging Culture
Within many multinational enterprises, the number of international workers is equal to or exceeds the number of employees located at headquarters.

For a company such as Aon, which was built on hundreds of acquisitions, creating a unified culture is essential. “We want to engage our clients as a united firm,” Crisanti said. Connecting people across cultures allows for an exchange of both knowledge and culture at the same time, helping the company retain organizational expertise while encouraging a curiosity to learn about other cultures and backgrounds.

At Northern Trust, the global mentoring program helps create and promote a more inclusive and unified culture. Mentoring helps employees share knowledge and best practices across the enterprise and at the same time promotes good cultural aspects of the Chicago headquarters outward to all of its global locations.

For example, Northern Trust is active in philanthropic efforts and community projects. The mentoring program helps it not only spread this cultural value of giving back through service as a global corporate citizen, but also identify people’s passions and talent that may be suited to service in their own communities. This keeps the organizational drive for philanthropy alive but expressed in ways that are appropriate and unique to local cultures.


http://www.diversity-executive.com/article.php?article=1088