More than 70% of the Fortune 500 companies offer some form of mentoring to their employees, hoping to boost performance and bolster retention, among other things. However, hard evidence of firms’ accruing those benefits has been scarce. New research finds that mentorship programs can indeed produce valuable gains—for employees and their firms—but only when they are mandatory. That’s because if mentoring is optional, the people most in need of it tend to decline the opportunity.
The two-pronged experiment involved 603 newly hired sales reps at a U.S. inbound call center. In the first part of the study, 110 randomly selected reps were assigned to a mandatory four-week mentorship program consisting of structured discussions with their mentors in which they shared their responses to standardized questions and obtained feedback. During their first two months on the job they generated 19% more daily revenue, on average, than 171 unmentored counterparts did, and the increase was durable, with more than 90% of the revenue gains sustained over six months. And the mentored reps were 14% more likely to stay with the company for at least a month—a significant gain given that sales forces suffer from notoriously high attrition among recent hires.
In the second part of the experiment, training personnel at the call center asked another group of sales reps whether they wanted a mentor. Those who said yes were randomly divided into two subgroups. People in the first were given mentors, whereas those in the second were told that none were available. The researchers found that mentoring did not produce lasting benefits. There was no difference in average productivity between the two subgroups, and although those in the first were 14% more likely than those in the second to stay with the company for at least a month, the retention difference disappeared after three months. Importantly, both subgroups significantly outperformed the reps who had opted out of the program, generating 30% more daily revenue, on average. “It seems that the people least in need of mentoring are the ones who seek it,” says Christopher Stanton, an associate professor at Harvard Business School and one of the study’s authors.
The reasons for this paradox are not clear. “It could be that low performers are insecure and shy and so are reluctant to participate,” Stanton says. “Or it could be just the opposite: They might have an inflated sense of their own abilities and believe that they don’t need help.”(HBR)