Taking care of the mentee’s line manager

The mentee’s line manager is a key stakeholder in the mentoring relationship. The relationship between the mentee and their line manager will be one of the topics of conversation in mentoring sessions. The manager also holds primary responsibility for the mentee’s development – yet they may have little idea of what mentee and mentor are focusing on. They are expected to take on trust that the mentoring relationship will be beneficial to them and their team as well as to the mentee.

So it’s important to keep them involved and feeling that they are a valued part of the process. This involves, at the minimum:

• Consulting them in the planning stages about what they want the mentoring programme to achieve and about any concerns they may have about it. This is also a good time to get them thinking about who will benefit most from mentoring, rather than who deserves to have a mentor. (This subtle shift in mindset can have a major, positive impact on the quality of recommendations they make.) It’s also useful to get them thinking about the questions:
  • Would you make a good mentor?
  • How would being a mentor benefit you?
• Programme launch is an opportunity to show line managers that they have been listened to, and to expand upon their roles and responsibilities in supporting the mentoring relationships. Effective briefings:
  • Reinforce clarity about what mentoring is and isn’t; and about what each of the parties should expect of each other. This includes how the line manager will recognise and acknowledge changes in the mentee. (If they are not looking for them, they may simply not notice them, because they see only what they expect to see.)
  • Clarify the boundaries and any overlaps between the role of the mentor and the role of the line manager
  • Emphasise the importance of confidentiality of the mentor-mentee conversations and what the line manager can and can’t legitimately ask about those conversations. It’s important to help the line manager become comfortable with not knowing what is being discussed between mentor and mentee
  • Provide a chance to voice any remaining concerns
  • Reinforce the benefits to all parties, including the line manager and reiterate the programme purpose and its link to business priorities
  • Rehearse the conversation they need to have with the mentee, about how they will support the mentoring relationship. For example, rather than decrease the amount of development time they spend with the mentee (i.e. abdicate some or all of the development opportunity to the mentor), the line manager and the mentee may contract to have a regular monthly meeting to review the mentee’s changing learning priorities, their progress against any goals they are willing to share with the line manager, and opportunities to give the mentee assignments that will stretch them and reinforce the learning they are extracting from the mentoring conversations.
  • Reassure the line manager about support available to them, to play their part in the mentee’s development.

• During the course of the mentoring relationship, the programme manager can check in with the line manager from time to time, to surface any concerns and to point them towards additional resources that they can use to improve their developmental conversations with the mentee (and with other team members). It’s also good practice to:
  • Include line managers in feedback and measurement (e.g. in what ways do they think the mentee has learned and /or changed?) through surveys, interviews or focus groups. The focus groups can of course be face to face or virtual.
  • Have an on-line secure forum for line managers to discuss their thoughts and concerns about the mentoring programme.
  • Include a line manager perspective in any presentations to sponsors about the programme’s progress
• At the end of the formal programme, include managers in both the review process and the celebrations. This is an opportunity to bring mentor, mentee and line manager together (again either virtually or face to face) to recognise how each has contributed to the mentee’s development over the period. If you are going to video mentors and mentees talking about their experience, for programme marketing purposes or to use in future training, include also some interviews with line managers.

Some issues to be aware of:

• Early mentoring programmes sometimes had the line manager accompany the mentee to the first meeting with the mentor. This tended to shape the mentoring agenda around the line manager’s perspectives and priorities, rather than those of the mentee, and hindered the natural emergence of relationship purpose and goals. Bringing all three together at the end of the formal programme is recommended, however, wherever possible.
• Letting conflicts of advice undermine the openness of the mentoring relationship. If the mentor is guiding the mentee towards one solution and the line manager towards another, it can place damaging stress on both the mentoring relationship and the relationship between the mentee and the line manager. Rather than confront the issue, the mentee may simply try to avoid it. As part of contracting, all parties – mentee, mentor and line manager – should contract that, if such a situation should occur:
  • The mentee will be open about it to both the mentor and their line manager
  • The mentor will help the mentee think through the conversation they need to have with their line manager
• If the line manager changes during the course of the formal mentoring relationship, the new line manager will not have been involved in the initial contracting. The programme manager and the mentee both have a responsibility to bring the new line manager up to speed and engage their full collaboration. This can be done separately, or the programme manager can facilitate a three-way conversation.

All of this seems common sense – and it is. Yet many mentoring programmes fail to invest in ensuring the line manager is a positive influence on the success of mentoring relationships. Looking after the line manager helps to maximise the support for the mentee. And line managers, who have developed positive insights into mentoring are more likely to want to join the mentor pool.

© David Clutterbuck, 2016