Should People Choose Their Own Mentors?
By Anne Fisher

(FORTUNE Magazine) – Dear Annie: My company is starting a mentoring program, and opinion is sharply divided on whether to assign mentors to people or permit them to choose their own. Which way works best? -- On the Fence

Dear OTF: Assigning mentors to your employees "offers the certainty of a match being made on some kind of objective criteria," notes Tom McGee, vice president of Triple Creek Associates (www.3creek.com), which has set up mentoring programs for Citigroup, Motorola, and the U.S. Air Force, among others. However, "people are inherently subjective creatures, and the trend is moving toward mentors and mentees being actively involved in selecting each other," he says. The reason? First, "both mentors and mentees can have suspicions and questions about why they were chosen for each other and tend to blame the matching party for any problems in the relationship." Why put yourself in that position? Then, too, you run the risk of using faulty matchmaking criteria. "For example, the assumption that people participating in diversity mentoring programs are looking for someone of the same race or gender has been proved wrong in many cases," McGee says. On top of that, "most businesses now are cutting back on lockstep classroom training," says McGee. A program where the matches are imposed from above is "likely to be expensive, time-consuming, and out of sync with your company's other, more self-directed training efforts." Does that help?

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