1. Improve Retention Rates
The cost of staff turnover is estimated at anywhere from ½ to 5 times an employee’s annual wages depending on their position. And this doesn’t account for the immeasurable loss associated with losing exceptional talent.

There is strong evidence that mentoring programs help to retain staff. A well constructed mentoring program has been demonstrated to increase the chances that people will stay - by one third on average and in exceptional cases by as much as 1000%. (See Clutterbuck, D. (2004), Everyone Needs A Mentor (4th Ed), London:CIPD)

As well as making people feel valued and providing a safety valve for career frustrations, mentoring can point people toward internal rather than external job opportunities. Consider this: only 20% of employees are likely to look first at their current employer for their next job. For people in mentoring relationships this rises to almost 100%. (See Horizons Unlimited article Mentoring and Retention)

2. Break Down Communication Silos
In his book, Spanning Silos, David Aaker makes the point that communication silos cause firms to misallocate resources, send inconsistent messages to the marketplace and fail to leverage economies of scale and successes. There is a high potential cost to the internal boundaries within your organisation.

Good mentoring programs are shown to increase both the quality and quantity of communication across internal boundaries.

3. Avoid Underutilising Talented Staff
Too often organisations fail to capitalize on talented staff purely and simply because they have failed to take note of their talent. Sometimes cultural, ethnic or gender barriers lead to a sort of talent blindness on the part of management. Other times management simply overlooks parts of the organisation altogether.

How can any organisation have good succession planning and corporate growth strategies without a solid grasp of their talent pool?

Mentoring is often found to be the most effective means of breaking down gender and racial barriers. This is not simply a matter of ideology, but an opportunity to choose the best talent from a broader pool.

Mentoring also enables senior managers to gain a deep and personal understanding of their employees, equipping them to make better decisions regarding placement and development of talented people.

4. Reinforce Your Corporate Culture
Leaders work hard to establish a code of values and behaviours that the organisation is expected to live by. But the bigger an organisation becomes the harder it is to be confident that these values are seeded throughout the company and not simply words dusted off for shareholders meetings and company conventions. Once again this is not merely an ideological issue. There can be a high cost in public perception when organisations fail to live by their own code.

By selecting mentors who represent the values and behaviours the organisation wishes to promote, a mentoring program can be used to create a positive cycle of role modeling that reinforces the culture leaders are striving to achieve.

5. Foster a Coaching and Mentoring Culture
There is a growing interest in companies across the world in creating a sustainable coaching and mentoring environment. Why? Because almost every study on effective management demonstrates that the managers who get the most out of their teams, spend a high proportion of their time and energy coaching and mentoring others.

In other words, a coaching and mentoring culture leads to increased productivity.

A well-developed mentoring program can be invaluable in developing and sustain a coaching and mentoring culture. It is never enough to simply provide coaching and mentoring training, managers need to learn through practice. A formal mentoring program provides training, feedback and consistent practice. It is an ongoing commitment to good management practices.

Of course it is not enough simply to have a mentoring program, it is essential that the program be well structured. The International Standards for Mentoring Programs in Employment(ISMPE) provide a benchmark for good practice. Also refer to the following articles on our website: Mentoring and Retention, Creating a Coaching and Mentoring Culture, The Business Case for Mentoring and Mentoring for Diversity.

If you require advice on mentoring program structure or assistance in recruiting, training and matching mentors and mentees please contact us.

A filmed version of his address is on this page. In the meantime you can see his presentation slides here. We'd love to hear your feedback - we hope you join the conversation.

Now that the dust has settled, on this round at least, there is no doubt that the media, the Labor Party and the punters will be asking who is to blame. Neuroscience would suggest that the human brain itself has played a part in the unraveling of the Labor team.

The primary organizing principle of the human brain is to minimize danger, maximize reward. Neuroscientists refer to the approach-avoid response, which basically means that for every stimulus we encounter, the brain will tag it as either good or bad and consequently will choose to engage (approach) or disengage (avoid).

We have known for decades that the approach/avoid response is designed to keep us alive, to ensure that the caveman runs from the wooly mammoth, and we keep our hands off the stove. More recently neuroscience has demonstrated that the brain uses very similar circuitry for interacting within our social world. In other words, the brain will treat a perceived threat to your status in much the same way it would treat a threat to your life.

In his book ‘Your Brain At Work’, David Rock identifies five domains of social interaction that can trigger approach/avoid response (SCARF model). These are status (where do I fit in the pecking order?); certainty (can I predict the future?); autonomy (am I in control?); relatedness (do I feel safe with others?) and fairness.

Now, let’s go back to the Labor team. Ever since the 2010 overthrow the status of Kevin Rudd and his backers has been threatened. Rudd’s subsequent behavior as an apparent “team terrorist” has threatened Julia Gillard’s sense of being safe within the ranks of her own team. A tenuous hold on a minority government has created a threat to the entire team’s sense of certainty. The ongoing conflict between Rudd and Gillard backers threatens each side’s sense of autonomy. There is a widespread sense that the deposing of Kevin Rudd was unfair.

Here is a team under considerable social threat. Now let’s consider what happens when the brain senses threat.

When the human brain senses threat it sends resources to those parts of the body needed for ‘fight or flight’, which reduces the resources available to the neocortex, or thinking part of the brain. Daniel Goleman referred to this as an ‘amygdala hijack’, and reported how this can lead to emotive and irrational responses.

When the amygdala is activated less oxygen and glucose flows to the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for working memory. The subtle signals required to solve non-linear problems and gain insights are not perceived by a brain busy warding off threat. There is a tendency to generalize more, and to err on the safe side, missing opportunities.

If you have felt over the last 18 months that the Labor team has made foolish decisions and reacted recklessly, this is not because they are stupid but because they are operating with their brains in a state of constant threat. If you feel that the vitriol of the last 10 days has been idiotically self-destructive, this is because the threat has become so great that many are reacting with their primitive brains, not their thinking brains.

It is easy to sit back as say ‘that’s politics’, but the truth is that what happened to the Labor Party can and does happen to many teams. However, the good news for team leaders is that our increasing understanding of the brain enables us to manipulate the drivers that trigger the approach/avoid response.

Knowing that a loss of status will trigger a threat response, a leader can consciously work to minimize loss of face. Understanding when a team member has had an amygdala hijack, enables a leader to react appropriately rather than meeting emotion with emotion. More positively, understanding what drivers activate a reward response, a leader can reduce their reliance on financial reward and tap into internal rewards.

The brain may have caused mayhem within the Labor team, but it has the potential to deliver exceptional team performance. Neuroscience has not just demonstrated the negative effect of threat, it has also shown that a team experiencing positive “reward” emotions will see more options, solve more non-linear problems, collaborate better and perform better.

Julia Gillard, and every other team leader, would be well advised to think about the brain’s reflexive response to threat and the impact it may be having upon their team. Then think about what can be done to shift the brain into a more positive and productive setting.

Horizons Unlimited helps individuals and teams use the brain’s approach/avoid response to positively influence team effectiveness and business outcomes. If your brain sometimes gets hijacked, if you have a “team terrorist” to manage in your team, or you would simply like to know more, give us a call.

For a word with only three letters FIT is a very big concept.  From our first jigsaw puzzle we learned that to create a perfect whole we needed to find the right piece for each spot.  No amount of pushing and shoving could make a piece fit where it didn’t belong.  The same is true of a well functioning team, and yet so often we see teams where poor fit goes undetected, tolerated or bullied to fit through submission.

Teams are complex organisms – all those individual pieces that must collectively create an outcome.  Organisations engage in team development work in search of alignment between the self, the team and the organisation, to form that perfect puzzle that is the high performance team.  Ironically the very process of team development can glaringly expose the pieces that don’t fit.  Which is why leaders must brace themselves to confront and contend with issues of fit if they want team development work to go beyond a talk fest and a group hug.

Effective team development work always begins with establishing awareness of the self and the team.  At Horizons Unlimited we use individual profiling and one-on-one interviews to tease out each individual’s understanding of themselves, their position within the team and their alignment with the vision, mission, values and strategy of the organisation.  We then play back an overview in our first group meeting and start to build team awareness.

It is at this stage that those submerged issues of fit can no longer be overlooked.  As the team works to put the puzzle together, the pieces that don’t fit are going to stand out.  This is painful for everyone.  Individuals feel threatened; the team feels discomfited; the leader is often unsure how to address the growing disquiet.  As the process continues the pressure will mount and it will be apparent to all that change is essential.

Leaders who take their team into development work must be prepared for the discomfort and must be ready to act.  Recognise when poor fit is hindering the team, understand the issues that are shaping the problem and deal with it.  Failure to respond quickly enough on problems of fit is the number one leadership regret we encounter. The paradox is that not acting merely prolongs and escalates the pain, while dealing with it is painful at the time, everyone is relieved, once the fit issue is resolved.

Generally there are three things at work when a person fails to fit in their role.  Role-specific technical skills may not be up to the expectations of the team.  Weak interpersonal skills may be hindering communication.  Non-alignment with the vision and purpose of the team may prevent the individual from feeling inspired by their role.

When deciding how to act consider the root cause of the misfit and then consider three possible courses of action:

Structural Change:  Change the way the pieces fit together
A change in the team structure, placing individuals in roles better suited to individual abilities and motivations, may alleviate the problem.

Individual Coaching:  Reshape the piece to fit the puzzle better
If the issues relate to interpersonal skills or alignment, individual coaching may be effective in improving communication and changing beliefs.

Exit the Team: Take the piece out of the puzzle
Often an exit from the team is self-selected as the team development process becomes increasingly uncomfortable for the individual.  Where it is not, and where structural change or individual coaching are deemed inappropriate or fail to change things, the leader must be prepared to exit the person from the team.

Team development work sounds like a feel-good process, but in fact issues of fit very often make the work extremely uncomfortable.  It is the leader’s role to feel that pain and to act quickly to relieve it.

If you are concerned about issues of fit or seeking to build your team’s alignment and enrolment please call us to discuss the ways we can help you to establish a high performance team.

Posted by Graham Richardson