Just going by simple definitions, “peer mentoring” ought to be an oxymoron. After all, “peers” are one’s equals. Mentoring, historically, is quite different. According to Wikipedia, referring to the origin of the term in Greek literature:
“Because of Mentor’s relationship with Telemachus, and the disguised Athena’s encouragement and practical plans for dealing personal dilemmas, the personal name Mentor has been adopted in English as a term meaning someone who imparts wisdom to and shares knowledge with a less experienced colleague.”
So what’s all this “peer mentoring?” On the one hand, it’s old wine in new skins. There have been programs where people received advice and counsel from their peers for decades. Vistage’s “peer support” programs are a good example.
On the other hand, peer mentoring is drawing a lot of interest for some very good reasons. Two of them are well explained in a recent Fortune article titled, “When leaders are scarce, employees look to peers.” Leaders are indeed scarce according to the article, quoting Brian Kropp, a managing director at the Corporate Executive Board CEB).
“Since 2008, the middle-management level at large companies has been gutted, according to a study from the CEB. On average, managers now have 50 percent more direct reports and 20 percent less time to spend with these reports.”
That’s one reason why 25 percent of large US companies have peer mentoring programs today, up from around five percent in 2007. But companies are also seeing peer mentoring as a way to leverage the fresh perspective of new hires as well as attract the kind of people who enjoy helping others succeed. The article shares the example of Microsoft who hired 300 experienced people and then assigned them as mentors to Microsoft employees.
This really is less about “mentoring” and more about how we increasingly will be learning from each other on the job. Harold Jarche writes regularly about the need for personal knowledge management and continuous learning in this new world of work.
That learning will happen in a community. That’s the exciting part for me. It’s nothing new, but technology and a flattened corporate structure will make it more powerful and more necessary. I think that, eventually, the term “peer mentoring” will disappear and what we’re describing will just be “the way we work and learn.”
