In my professional life, the people I value the most have been those that have mentored me and those that I have mentored. The connection between the mentor and the mentee is one of trust, respect, and an intellectual bonding that sometimes transcends the intimacy that even personal relationships have. In an organisation, learning and development are key to the success of the employees and in turn to the success of the company.

Add the element of mentoring to this and the results can be even better. Given the highly competitive and dynamic business environment in which we function, there is critical need for us to not just provide an environment of learning in our organisations. We also need to provide an environment of mentoring if we want to equip our people to think on their feet, adapt to change, take quick decisions and give their best to the organisation.

I recently read Lois Zachary’s book on this called Creating a Mentoring Culture. Zachary says mentoring combines learning with the compelling human need for connection and provides the much-needed support for individuals to grow. The many benefits of creation a culture that has mentoring at its core include increased retention rates, improved morale, increased organisational commitment and job satisfaction, accelerated leadership development, better succession planning, reduced stress, stronger and more cohesive teams, and of course, heightened individual and organisational learning.

The fact is that mentoring treats each employee as an individual and therefore makes them feel more engaged and involved with the organisation, as well as better informed. Zachary also makes the distinction between a mentoring programme and a mentoring culture. While the former can be used to achieve localised, short-term goals, any sustained benefits of mentoring can only happen when mentoring is embedded into the organisation’s very ethos. Her book then goes on to map out exactly how to create the mentoring culture in your organisation, right down to the forms and frameworks you need to use.

The fact is that when you are leading an organisation, you are able to see the bigger picture, the direction you want the organisation to go towards and the goals you need to set for employees to follow you into that direction. However, from the leadership to the last person down the line, the message gets diffused and sometimes even obfuscated because of the individual limitations of managers in the chain of command. When you create a mentoring culture, that linearity is broken and learning and development become more democratic. Zachary is not the only person who talks about this, but the book is invaluable in the tools it offers to actually put these thoughts to practice.

More than the nuts and bolts of it, though, I would recommend reading the book to understand that the time for a top-down-only approach to learning and development is passé. We live in times where people are increasingly feeling empowered as individuals and finding ways to voice their opinions. Organisations have to adapt to these changing times if they want to not just hold on to their employees but also learn from them in order to grow. A mentoring culture, therefore, isn’t just something feel-good you can think about for a while and move on. It is increasingly becoming an imperative.