Guest Blog: Kim Wise, the founder of Mentor Resources

As an observer of the business environment, I find myself startled at the short-sightedness of managers who make comments like these.  These questions are short-sighted and reflect the commentator’s own fears.  Any company that expects to stay in business for the long haul needs to be constantly monitoring and upgrading its skills.

It is well documented that an outstanding manager (or employee) will contribute significantly more than an average employee in the same position to the firm’s bottom line.  Thus, it should be obvious that leveraging your best employees impacts the bottom line in a meaningful way. Today especially, every manager needs every one of his or her employees to be a better than average employee.  Rather than taking employees for granted (“since there are no jobs out there”), managers should be focused on increasing engagement, efficiency and proficiency at the job.

The impact can be meaningful: In a Harvard Business Review article on Employee Engagement, BestBuy shared that a 0.1% increase in average employee satisfaction within a store increases revenues, at that store, by $100,000 per year.

Mentoring is the fastest way to share the perspective, insights and knowledge of the outstanding employees.  Tacit knowledge is the counterpart to classroom learning.  It’s the subtle lessons of experience and observation over time.

When an employee who has been successful in the organization agrees to mentor a less experienced employee and they click – creating a good mentoring experience – the perspective of the successful employee is leveraged and magnified.

There are software tools that can help the mentor matching, to cost effectively maximize the mentoring program.  The market leader is Mentor Resources, which provides software for the administration of formal mentoring programs. WisdomShare™ is a proprietary algorithm which matches Mentors and Mentees to create a good match, where the pair share personality traits. This software is often supplemented by Mentor Training by a consultant like Thor-Erik Gulliksen.

Kim Wise is the founder of Mentor Resources, a premier provider of tools for formal mentoring programs, using WisdomShare™ an artificial-intelligence matching system. The software has been selected by a number of European-based multinational corporations because it generates the best possible match for the Mentor/Mentee pair, with clear guidance and measurable goals which are strategically aligned with the organization’s long-term goals.