CPA Mentoring: You Can Munch, But It’s More Than Lunch

Eight structured steps that CPA firms can use to develop and nurture talent.

Unfortunately, even the best-intentioned mentoring initiatives can easily fizzle in the early stages, before delivering value to the participants and the organization at large, according to Molly Sargent of Norwalk, Conn.-based Professional Impressions Consulting.

Sargent

Molly has trained and coached thousands of financial professionals and client-facing executives in professional image, presentation skills, business etiquette and sales effectiveness. Since 1985, she has helped major accounting firms and Fortune 500 companies, including Aetna, American Express, AT&T, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Key Bank, MasterCard, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Prudential achieve breakthrough results.

With so much to gain, how can your firm initiate mentoring in a way that is successful and sustainable?

The key is a well-structured and well-supported program from Day One.

1. Reshape the perception of what mentoring means — It’s more than just lunch. It’s a process.

2. Pair your people well — Consider yourself the accounting version of Match.com.  Incorporate low-cost, yet effective assessment tools to determine thinking styles and work habits.

3. Develop the skills of your mentors and their protégés — Start with an orientation session that gives mentors and mentees an overview of the mentoring process, a timeline that they can follow with specific benchmarks and milestones along the way, and give them training on listening, asking questions and delivering feedback.

4. Encourage a structured approach to conducting mentoring conversations — Begin by providing discussion guidelines for the initial phase of get-togethers. Conversations can later be conducted over the phone.

5. Support the learning process — Provide mentors with support services that help train and develop their mentees, independent of the mentor’s need to administer them. These services might include classroom training, webinars and podcasts.

6. Listen — Plan on conducting individual and group discussions that seek feedback about the program, perhaps gathering all the mentors on one call and all the mentees on another call.

7. Make enhancements — Incorporate the ideas you gather from your “listening calls” into the program and support materials and involve the participants in making the changes to the materials.

8. Communicate your success — Look for measures such as: the low-cost of training; improved employee satisfaction ratings; improved employee retention ratings; better and more frequent internal communications; greater diversity in leadership-ready positions. By tracking your impact and sharing the story, more people will want to participate in the program, your budget will be easier to justify and everyone in your organization will reap the benefits.

From this week’s CPA Insider newsletter, read the full article.

Visit Molly Sargent at http://www.proimpress.com/

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Posted at April 6, 2009
Filed Under BSG [CPA TRENDLINES] | 1 Comment

Comments

One Response to “CPA Mentoring: You Can Munch, But It’s More Than Lunch”

  1. Bonnie on April 7th, 2009 12:29 pm

    When setting up the mentoring program at our firm, we were told by an outside consultant the accounting, engingeering and law firms all have trouble with mentoring programs. Why? Because by trade and usually personality we are fixers. We are trained to identify the problem and find the best solution. This however, may not be what the individual being mentored wanted out of the relationship.

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