Mentoring and Burnout Prevention
Relationships play a critical role in creating a sense of meaningful work, driving employee engagement, increasing retention, and fighting burnout. Yet, not every relationship contributes equally to those outcomes. Some relationships are especially effective at developing the mental, emotional, and professional reserves. These relationships may be formal or informal and typically take the form of a mentor-mentee dyad. Employees typically seek out mentors to benefit from their expertise, organizational tenure, and professional experience. Likewise, mentors may “adopt” a protégé for any number of reasons such as a desire to give back to the organization, recognizing an undeveloped talent, or simply finding a personal or professional connection after being matched with someone less experienced on a work initiative or project.
Mentoring has been linked to many positive outcomes in both academic and practitioner business literature. It has been shown to decrease job stress, reduce burnout, and contribute to positive career development and performance outcomes. These findings hold true even for those who frequently experience workplace stress due to positional issues (such as high job demands) and those that have a predisposition towards experiencing negative emotions or heightened stress. CEOs and senior leaders understand that job demand related stress typically comes with the job description. For them, the benefits of mentorship may be especially compelling. Yet, while many leaders understand the value of mentoring others within their business, they are typically cut off from receiving mentoring within the confines of their organization. CEOs and top executives must typically look outside their firm to find mentor relationships that are free from the influence of organizational power dynamics.
Mentoring has a long history of positive personal and organizational outcomes across a wide variety of disciplines from business, arts, and even politics. The American politician John C. Crosby, who was elected to represent Massachusetts's 12th congressional district in 1890, described mentoring as “a brain to pick, an ear to listen, and a push in the right direction.” Crosby’s century old insight into the nature of mentoring resonates with modern scholarship. “Building trust, transparency and rapport, and facilitating learning” (Lai & Palmer, 2019, p. 143) are among the essential factors and skills that motivate today’s top executives to seek out mentoring and development from coaches outside their organization.
Eight systematic reviews and meta-analyses conducted from 2014 through 2019 on workplace coaching confirm that mentoring generates positive effects at both the individual and organizational level (Graßmann et al., 2019; Athanasopoulou and Dopson, 2018; Bozer and Jones, 2018; Blackman et al., 2016; Grover and Furnham, 2016; Jones et al., 2016; Sonesh et al.,2015; Theeboom et al., 2014). These and other studies laid the foundation for a recent empirical exploration published in the current edition of Human Resource Development Quarterly by Varghese et al (2020).
While the positive effects of mentoring and coaching are supported by research and lived experience, it is worth taking a moment to unpack exactly what coaching and mentoring actually are. Coaching is typically defined as “a socratic-based, future-focused dialogue between a facilitator (coach) and a participant (coachee/client), whose purpose is to stimulate the self-awareness and personal responsibility of the participant” (Lai and Palmer, 2019). Similarly, mentoring in organizations is understood in terms of coaching conversations that function as a future-focused career development resource and a form of workplace social support (Varghese et al, 2020).
Even for those with a predisposition toward workplace stress, mentors weaken the relationship between stress and burnout (Varghese et al, 2020). The team also found that the type of mentor mattered. Formal mentors moderated the relationship between stress and burnout as well as mental and emotional exhaustion. However, informal mentors had no statistical effects. The take-away? When it comes to mentoring, quality matters. Leaders should seek out mentors who can provide both social and career related support and take steps to formalize the relationship. Those who do are more likely to sustain those relationships over time and reap the resulting positive mental, emotional, and performance-related benefits they desire.
Leading others is hard work, but the social and professional support of a qualified and committed external point of view can help.
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