Be Vigilant for Obstacles to Learning

The late Geary Rummler was fond of saying, “You can take highly motivated, well-trained employees, put them in a lousy system, and the system will win every time.” Effective learning results can become ineffective performance results if the protégé enters a system, process, or unit that punishes—or simply does not encourage—the newly acquired skills. A crucial part of your role is to be ever vigilant for obstacles that undermine the learning acquired through your mentoring.

Think of your protégé’s learning as a newly planted tree. In time the tree will have deep roots and a hardy resistance to wind, disease, and extreme temperatures. But as a sapling, it is particularly vulnerable. It must be supported, protected, and meticulously cared for until it can fend for itself. And it takes time and patience. In the words of the old adage, “You don’t need to pull the tree up by the roots every five minutes to see if it’s still growing and traumatize it.” So it is with a protégé. As a novice, he is still learning, and his new skills are weak and unstable. Defending new behavior against external pressures to go back to the old way is challenging. Protégés need mentors to aid in their struggle to sustain new skills.

Several years ago one of us consulted with a large high-tech firm eager to make customer service its claim to fame. The CEO decided that everyone on the front line would be assigned a mentor to meet with weekly for an hour to talk about customer-service challenges. Managers were given mentoring training, procedures were put in place to ensure the weekly mentor-protégé meetings occurred, and everyone was happy with the initial results. In fact, customer service scores made significant jumps as frontline employees, armed with enhanced skills and newfound support, turned indifference into enthusiasm.

Six months into the mentoring project, the CEO decided to delegate the system-wide effort to someone in a staff role. It signaled a dampening of commitment. Managers were pressured to trim their one-hour sessions to thirty minutes; then weekly became monthly. As results declined and customer satisfaction scores turned downward, pressure was put on the staff leader to “fix it.” The solution was to take an iron-fist approach to paperwork completion. Early enthusiasm turned to cynicism and resentment. The company was acquired, the CEO was replaced, and the mentoring endeavor was replaced with more hard-line, cost-cutting efforts. You can imagine how the rest of the story played out.