Mentoring Program Models

I haven’t been writing much about mentoring in my blog because we are in
the process of designing a new pilot mentoring program and are still in
discussions. However, today I made a presentation about
SEED (Sun’s world-wide
Engineering mentoring program) to another company. As often happens, in
answering questions in a different context, I understood what I was
explaining in a new way. This is to try to explain SEED’s model in the new way again
so I don’t forget what I said…

One of the problems of the SEED program is that is does not scale. SEED relies
on hand-matching of each pair rather than on an automated system. This means
that SEED can handle only 200 to 250 participants (or mentees or proteges) in about
six terms a year. There are two reasons why SEED has chosen hand-matching:

• About 3/4 of SEED’s mentors are senior executives (Directors, Distinguished
  Engineers, Fellows, Vice Presidents) who are likely to have remarkable accomplishments
  and better-than-average communication skills but also require individualized support
  to be able to participate. The program is run to ensure ease of participation and convenience of Mentors. Mentors who are happy with their experience recommend SEED to
  others. Also, SEED has found that the source of the request for an executive to become
  a mentor matters. A trusted source seems to return a higher number of acceptances
  to mentor match requests.
• Participants are asked to add names to their SEED Mentor Wish List primarily
  because of the
  potential mentors’ accomplishments, experience, personality, capabilities, or skills.
  In creating their Mentor Wish List, each SEED participant needs to make two hard
  decisions:
  1. What they want to learn
  2. Who has already accomplished the kind of things they want to do
     (that is, who is already down the path that they see themselves walking)

  That is, SEED encourages participants to pick based on the mentee’s review and
  analysis of what potential mentors have already done rather than on
  self-identified lists of capabilities provided by a mentor.

Other mentoring programs do use self-identified lists of capabilities. Such lists
allow automated mentor-mentee matching on a large scale. One popular program creates
an average of 2,000 mentoring relationships a year. However, not everyone
is good at knowing what they are good at. For more, read: Justin Kruger and David
Dunning (Cornell University),

“Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
(from the APA – American Psychological Association): December 1999, Vol. 77, No.6, 1121-1134.

By preferring executive mentors who have remarkable accomplishments and
then asking mentees to request mentors based what they have already demonstrated,
SEED seeks to avoid the problems of mistaken self-identified competencies. However,
this also means that the SEED program does not scale.

More information on SEED is available at
http://research.sun.com/SEED/