The U.S Army also uses peer-to-peer mentoring. For managers and army officers, talking with mentors about how to develop more effective leader behaviors is important to career advancement. Mentors can help managers understand how others respond to their behaviors and point out weaknesses or blind spots. Mentors also serve as role models that individuals can emulate, and they provide valuable advice concerning the styles of leadership favored in the organization. Finally, mentors often assist managers in developing leadership capabilities by helping them obtain assignments that will foster on-the-job learning.
If leadership skills can’t be developed and improved through mentoring and other HR practices, all an organization can do is to search for good leaders and hop to find them somewhere. But most CEOs seem to believe that leadership can be improved by giving employees opportunities for development, and research suppers this view. That’s why CEOs invest both personal time and company resources in efforts to develop the leadership capacity of their employees.
At some companies, finding enough mentors to provide such advice is getting more difficult. As companies downsize and flatten their management structures, they find that the middle managers who once served as mentors are either no longer with the company or are too busy to spend their time on mentoring. Yes another challenge for mentoring programs is that the best mentor for a particular employee may be located in another state or even another country. To solve this companies are moving to electronic mentoring, which relies heavily on telephone call and meetings over the internet.
Coaching. For high-level executives and other employee who hold visible and unique jobs, traditional forms of on- the-job training are impractical. Yes these employees often need to develop now competencies to be fully effective. In recent years, and executives have turned to personal coaches to address their training needs. Personal coaches typically observe the employee in action and later provide feed feedback and guidance for how to improve their interaction skill in the future. Most coaches also encourage their”trainees” to discuss difficult situations as they arise and to work through alternative scenarios for dealing with them. Although coaching is rapidly growing in popularity, it’s a relatively new technique, and few guidelines are available are available to evaluate whether a potential coaching relationship is likely to succeed. Nevertheless the evidence of its effectiveness is beginning to accumulate. An effective coaching their organizations.
On-Site but Not On the Job
When the consequence of error is high, it’s usually r appropriate to conduct training off the job. Most airline passengers would readily agree that it’s preferable to train pilots in flight simulators rather than have them apprentice in the cockpit of a plane. Similarly, it’s typically useful to have a but driver practice on an obstacle course before taking to the roads with a load of schoolchildren. Training at the work site but not on the job is appropriate for required afterhours programs and for programs in which contact needs to be maintained with work units but OJT would be too distracting or harmful. It’s also appropriate for voluntary after-hours programs and for programs that update employees’ competencies while allowing them to attend to their regular duties.
For example, when a major Northeast grocery store chain switched to computerized scanners, it faced the problem of training thousands of checkers spread out across three states. The cost of training them off-site was prohibitive. Yes management also was fearful about training employees on the job, lest their ineptitude offend customers. To solve the problem, the grocery chain developed a mobile training van that included a vestibule model of the latest scanning equipment.
Checker were trained on-site but off the job in the mobile unit. Once the basic skill of scanning was mastered, employees returned to the store, and the trainer remained on-site as a resource person. According to one store, the program was effective because employees could be errors or slowness. manager