Check progress
Before and after course evaluations can gauge employee development in certain areas, to some extent. But scores alone can’t reveal nuances of individual progress. That requires personal interaction.
“It’s important to set goals and then it’s important to provide honest feedback against those goals,” Scherer says. “If people aren’t progressing against those goals, then you really need to try to determine the root cause of it. People develop in different ways and different experiences affect them differently, and so you really have to, as a counselor, get underneath that.”
Initially, counselors are assigned to employees for biannual checkups. But the key is to be flexible — let employees choose new counselors and recognize that mentoring isn’t up to a single source.
“We definitely try to spread out the counseling responsibilities and instill in our managers that it’s everybody’s responsibility to be a counselor and to be a mentor,” Scherer says. “While someone may not be a formal counselor, they can still be a mentor.”
Deloitte offers periodic counselor training to refine skills. But generally, it comes down to three things.
“The first thing that’s really key is listening,” Scherer says. “We all like to go into meetings and have agendas and say our own things, but the first point is really getting that gut check with the person that you’re counseling and finding out how they think they’re doing, where they’re at.”
Listening means really digging in and asking employees to elaborate.
“Take a lot of notes and then come back and try to clarify points that you don’t understand,” Scherer says. “Sometimes, particularly when people are having career issues, they might not be able to articulate … what it is that’s causing them to not be able to meet their destination.”
For example, if your mentees have difficulty expressing themselves in a group meeting, find out what that means.
“Explain a situation to me where you were in a group setting and you weren’t able to present a part of the agenda and you wanted to do that,” Scherer might ask. “Why was that? Was it that your partner didn’t let you do that or you didn’t feel confident doing it or you didn’t ask your partner to do it?
“It’s really peeling back the onion and trying to figure out exactly what those root causes are. Then try to put together a plan to help a person get through a career issue that they might be dealing with.”
The second secret to effective mentoring is giving honest feedback, which is especially difficult when conducting a bad review. Scherer offers to sit in and show new counselors an example of how she handles tough conversations.
“Usually what I try to do is to talk through what the developmental points are — that’s how I refer to them — and acknowledging that we all have them,” she says. “Then try to put specifics around things that they can do to improve upon them. We always, when we’re giving feedback, want to try to then match it up with something that’s very tactical that they can do to help develop.”
If employees score low on a post-test, don’t dodge it. Address it, maybe sprinkling in a weak spot of your own, then suggest specific fixes. If they’re struggling on technical skills, for example, external classes may help. The more specific opportunity you can provide, the better — which leads to the third key.
Good counseling means connecting the dots. Stay informed of different opportunities within the company so you can match needs with solutions.
Scherer encourages mentors to reach out to others to feed a broader awareness of offerings to keep their mentees informed of opportunities.
That personal attention reveals the difference between an employee approaching burnout or thriving on additional responsibilities. It determines whether you should reduce their client load or simply encourage their hard work.
“There’s usually not one thing that we want them to be focused on,” Scherer says. “It really gets to what they want with their career development and then really working with their counselor to figure out the different experiences that will allow them to get to where they want to be.”
How to reach: Deloitte Tax LLP, (312) 486-1000 or www.deloitte.com
