Mentoring evolves to broader-brush activity

Participants are matched with mentors, or more experienced individuals within the same firm who are there to give advice and help develop their career.

Strictly speaking, by definition mentoring must be an internal process, because it is partly about learning to handle the politics of the organisation. It involves working out 'the way we do things around here'. But these days a wide variety of career management consultancies offer both mentoring and coaching, and financial institutions are increasingly using their services both to improve performance and aid retention.

Goldman Sachs, one of the best known investment banks to use mentoring, has internal programmes all the way up to managing director level. In Europe some 550 people are involved in equities alone, either as mentors or those being matched with them, the improbably named 'mentees'.

Although Goldman has used internal mentoring since the mid-1990s, it is only in the past year that the investment bank has constructed a formal programme, says Graham Ward, the global head of leadership and diversity for the equities division.

'We also pay particular attention to mentoring for women. It is generally felt they find it harder to progress in the City of London, and we try to give them further help with the infrastructure,' says Ward.

He says the bank now recognises that it is essential to maintain structure and momentum with the mentoring programme. 'If you set up (the mentor partnerships) and walk away, these things have a half-life. We have identified specific benefits of mentoring, including the strengthening of culture, the encouragement of self-reliance and the aiding of retention,' says Ward.

Retention is increasingly at the forefront of concern in many HR departments at financial institutions. A cultural tendency in the US to embrace self-improvement has also crossed the Atlantic and made executive coaching both acceptable and more desirable in Europe. But alongside traditional skills coaching, there now appears to be an increasing acceptance of coaching with a broader brush, which is sometimes confusingly called mentoring.

At Goldman Sachs, as at other investment banks, senior positions above MD level are often offered external coaching and mentoring. Stephen Johnson, chairman of Coutts Consulting, the career management consultancy, says: 'There is a higher baseline in the US for businesses to seek mentoring and coaching, but it is beginning to change here [in Europe] as well.'

As the competition for career management consultancies to get their foot in the door at investment banks is extremely tough, the confidentiality of their clients is paramount. It can be difficult to work out exactly what the mentoring contracts involve.

Johnson gives examples of individuals who are essentially transaction-oriented, seeking mentoring help to adapt to a different style of doing things. 'It is becoming very popular on the sales and marketing side in fixed-interest debt,' he says.

He offers the case of a highly accomplished woman, a transactor, who suddenly found she had to work across the Atlantic.

She had to deal with support from people she didn't control and didn't know, and she spent a good deal of time with Coutts learning new interpersonal skills and how to modify behaviour. Similarly, a man transferred from the US to the UK, where the international division was located, found he had a massive problem adjusting to the cultural differences and sought mentoring help.

Johnson at Coutts says: 'You have to learn how to operate in a changing environment. But the effectiveness of the process begins to tail off after 12 to 18 months because you start becoming part of the structure at that stage,' he adds. Most career management consultancies operating at senior levels cite 12 months as the average length of an assignment.

There are some complaints that financial institutions remain difficult about the need to deal with personal issues in mentoring. 'Investment banks such as Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB) and Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW) use mentoring at lower levels, but then they want tremendous control from within. We find in general investment banks are in danger of wanting a quick fix, instead of taking the time necessary to address the relevant questions,' says the managing director of a consultancy specialising in boardroom development, executive mentoring and coaching.

At the HR consultancy the Penna Group, there is a sense that financial services companies are beginning to realise that changes to long-established behaviour necessarily take months to bring about. Tammy Mindel, a coach with Penna Executive Coaching, also says that whereas coaching in Europe used to be seen as a remedial measure, it is now seen as a perk.

'Coaching and mentoring are the most personal ways of developing people. HR departments have started to have very clear strategies on how to go forward with this,' says Mindel. She says that in the US people demand coaches, and they can be a great support network for decision-making. 'Very often we act as a sounding board to senior executives,' she adds.

Peter Hogarth, who heads The Change Partnership, now the executive coaching arm of recruitment firm Whitehead Mann, says. 'It can be very lonely at the top.'

A great deal of the firm's work, which usually involves a period of 12 months or more, comes when executives are either recruited or promoted. 'We are there to help people be more effective,' says Hogarth.

The Change Partnership says it has worked with nine out of the 10 banks in the top M&A listing for Europe last year, and business is booming. Turnover this year is expected to exceed 5m (&euro8.1m), with a staff of 28 consultants, seven of whom are in the UK. In 1994, when the consultancy was founded, it had a staff of four people.

'Coaching is becoming endemic. Investment banks, clearing banks, insurance companies and even money brokers are using our services,' says Hogarth. Whether you call it coaching or part of a broader commitment to internal mentoring, it looks as if this is a growth market in Europe.

'All we need for a boom is for a number of individuals to come out of the closet and say they have been coached,' says one veteran executive coach.

But then again, as some of the bulge-bracket banks have discovered, one of the common problems in mentoring has been getting individuals from very different cultures to play along.