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‘Someone to watch over you’ by Heather Farmborough ‘The Financial Times, 6.1.2001

At 50 David Hall was a successful senior partner at an international firm of management consultants. He had long-standing clients and was on the company’s management committee. He was financially secure and had achieved all the obvious career goals. On the face of it, all was well. However, he was unsure about what he should do next – “I had some specific questions that needed answers”.

By chance, Hall met David Fish, who was working as a mentor. “David helped me understand that it was important for me, and indeed for the firm, to do what I was passionate about and good at and not necessarily what other people wanted me to do,” Hall says. “The process led me to taking on a new role inside the firm.”

Over the past couple of decades, mentoring in business has become increasingly popular, especially with senior directors. In 1989, an Industrial Society survey found that only 44 out of 145 organisations contacted practised mentoring.

A similar survey in 1995 found that almost half of the 647 organisations contacted, from voluntary bodies to financial and service companies, had some kind of mentoring scheme in place.

It all started in 1974 with sports coach Timothy Gallwey’s book The Inner Game of Tennis. Gallwey believed that, when the intuitive side of the brain is freed up to operate instinctively, as a child’s does, performance improves. He would later apply the same principle to golf and skiing and, from the early 1980s, would see his ideas applied to other fields, such as management.

Whereas coaching tends to be about specific short-term issues, mentoring takes the process one stage further, involving a more holistic approach. Chief executives, for instance, whose role is often lonely and isolated, can find a mentor an invaluable companion.

“At the beginning of the 20th century, increasing output was all about factories, plant and equipment,” says Fish, who is now one of the leading business mentors in the UK. “But for the past 20 years it has been about people – and particularly about how to keep and motivate the best people. The question of motivation is very subtle; people expect more personal satisfaction; our expectations and values have changed. Mentoring is part of that trend.”

Mentoring is about realising potential. The idea is to help clients capitalise on their strengths and to look at the results they want, often melting ineffective patterns or feelings that might be holding them back. “The presenting opportunity or dilemma is often work-related, but the causes and solutions usually lie at a deeper level,” says Fish. “Resolution in one area usually parallels breakthroughs in other areas.”

Psychologists and psychotherapists working in business agree that the faster pace of business, longer hours, tougher competition, downsizing, increased demands on fewer people, e-mail and the internet all add to the pressure of work. Stress is hardly new, but we cope better at some times than at others. Increased responsibilities, a new role, recent or impending organisational changes, a temporary crisis or recurring personal difficulties can send us out of balance. What’s more, our expectations have changed. Intangible rewards such as job satisfaction and fulfilment matter as much, in many cases, as income.

The critics of mentoring argue that this is precisely the problem. If we stopped regarding vague concepts such as happiness and fulfilment as 21^stcentury rights, they say, and “just got on with it”, things would be much simpler. But this doesn’t wash with a generation of thirty and nearly-forty-something executives who have grown up being able to talk about their feelings more than their predecessors. As Hall found, mentoring is not an airy-fairy, self-indulgent process. “I had to answer some very pragmatic questions,” he recalls. “The narrower it was, the more exacting.”

“We nearly always throw up an issue people don’t want to look at,” says Craigie Macfie of Coutts Consulting Group, “like a failing marriage, inappropriate commitment to the workplace at the family’s expense or being pushed too hard by their spouses.”

There is, however, a difference between mentoring and therapy. “In therapy, you’re often tied to the inner world of the individual,” observes Macfie. “While that’s useful, the context is equally important. In other words, how does the inner world impose itself on the outer world? Unless you have some understanding of both domains, I don’t think you can be effective. You have to translate that into something that people can do differently within their organisation.”

In practice, of course, there is often some overlap between counselling, therapy and mentoring, depending on the nature of the mentor, the client and the particular issues facing the client. Indeed, this is one reason why many mentors believe a background in psychology is essential. Most mentors, however, are reluctant to advance into the role of a counsellor and will refer on if they feel it is appropriate. Their task is to help the client at work.

I discovered this the first time I tried to interview Fish. We sat in his minimalist office off St James’s Street in central London. A tape recorder was on but it wasn’t mine. Fish wasn’t certain that he wanted to be interviewed. He certainly does not need or want publicity; his reputation rests on discretion and his clients come by word of mouth. I had agreed to have an informal chat with him first.

Dressed in a navy blazer with a silk handkerchief and smart grey casual trousers, Fish looks like a Harley Street consultant. I found out later that, although he has been an executive development consultant for more than 20 years, his early training was in medicine.

In our interview, Fish disconcertingly switched roles and asked all the questions. By the end of our meeting, I had revealed far more about myself than he had.

If this was mentoring, it was far from abstract. It was exacting and unsettling.

“Mentoring is definitely not counselling,” says Andy McGlashen, 39, a senior regional director with Bank of Scotland. “It can be very demanding.”

A year ago, McGlashen felt that he needed to raise his profile within the bank and to find out more about what was happening at the top of the organisation. After six months’ mentoring with Angela Mann – then at Coutts but now at Penna Executive Coaching – he had developed the confidence to approach senior executives directly about wider issues.

“I realised I was hesitant about doing this,” he recalls. “Then I started thinking that if I was hesitant about this I was probably hesitant about other things. Mentoring also gave me the chance to think about what I wanted to do in five years’ time rather than worrying about next month.”

Catherine McDowell had been at Barclays Bank for 20 years, including six years in New York with BZW. As a director of private banking with Barclays Offshore Services, she already had a senior position, but she wanted to extend herself by taking on some non-executive roles while continuing to manage a business area. She was worried that she had reached a glass ceiling. “I couldn’t see any senior women who had come from inside,” she says, “except in HR”.

With Terry Bates, also from Penna, she took apart her CV, focused on the skills she had and worked on those she needed. “Terry can be very sympathetic, but there were times when he pulled me up sharp.”

Catherine still runs the same business unit at Barclays, but is now also a non-executive director of TJ Hughes, the discount retailer. With Barclays’ backing, she is studying part-time for an MBA at Henley School of Management. She says she feels better equipped mentally and is much more confident about taking charge of her career.

Sometimes, it is losing touch with their creative side that holds clients back.

“A child picks up a chunk of bread and sees that it could be a car,” says Bates. “As we get older, we say, “Don’t be so silly.” But creativity in business is essential. People need conditions where they are free to access all the thoughts in their heads. Businesses are changing so rapidly that one doesn’t know where the next idea might be coming from. I work with a client in the credit card industry. It’s conceivable that in five years’ time credit cards might not exist.

So it’s essential to be creative in a non-linear way when looking ahead.”

David White, 29, was promoted from selling company pension schemes at the UK subsidiary of Crown Life, the Canadian Insurance company, to a marketing job at UK head office in Woking. He sensed hostility from his new colleagues, but could not work out why. Helped by Peter Needham at Penna, White gradually realised it was his behaviour that was alienating them.

In sales, if there was a problem, he had been expected to provide a solution. He had not anticipated that further up the management ladder there might not be a straightforward solution. He also felt that he had to be seen to be contributing at meetings. “I would come into a meeting and say, “we should do this,” he says.

“I was playing the role of a smart alec from the sales force – which was exactly what they had expected”.

Like many young directors, he was an expert in his own field but lacked maturity. By rehearsing situations with Nedham, he learnt how to avoid antagonising his fellow directors. “Peter would say something like, “How about making your point after everyone else’s rather than before?”

Why do we need mentors? Why can’t we just talk to our friends? “Does a friend see you in the business environment?” asks White. “No. Good friends are not trained counsellors. With a mentor, there is no hidden agenda, no axe to grind and complete honesty. Your mentor is the one person who says, ‘Maybe this is how you came across. Did you use those words? I understand what you’re saying, but someone else might not.”

Now 39 and the CEO for Tunbridge Wells Equitable, the friendly society, White still drives up to Penna’s Georgian offices in central London once a month. “People ask me: “You’ve had all this coaching. Why do you still need help? Why aren’t you an expert yourself?” says White. “Well, I just say that Pete Sampras is number one and he still has a coach who sees things no one else does.”

There are sceptics, of course. “If people have a problem with their boss, they’re probably in the wrong job,” says the finance director of a leading clearing bank, very much of the “just get on with it” school of thought. Then there is the argument that if people think too much about how they feel they may leave their job. (Indeed, a few years after he met Fish, Hall left the management consultancy he was working for to become chairman of a couple of internet start-ups and an adviser to an investment bank.) Others are wary of ‘soft’ concepts such as mentoring and emotional intelligence, which they see as being at odds with rational and operational behaviour.

“There may be some people who don’t need mentors,” concedes Craigie Macfie, “but I think it would be pretty arrogant to feel that you never needed anyone to talk things over with. When we’re stressed, we all have a tendency to rely on familiar, possibly automatic patterns rather than thinking of creative ways of handling things differently.”

Mentoring is not cheap. At the top of the UK mentoring market is a small number of highly sought after super-mentors – including David Fish*, Terry Bates and Macfie himself – who can charge up to £8,000 for a six month programme of six to eight sessions (sessions usually last a couple of hours, sometimes longer).

Then come a growing number of psychotherapists and psychologists working in business and offering mentoring and coaching as well as counselling and management development programmes. They charge less: six two hourly sessions might cost £500-£1,000, or they may charge a flat rate of £1,000-£2,000 per client for a day’s workshop. Bringing up the rear is an army of self-employed psychotherapists, retired business executives and other coaches who usually charge lower rates.

Wit this sort of earning potential, no wonder that Gerard O’Donovan’s coaching training courses every six weeks at the Life Coaching Academy are full booked. O’Donovan’s is just one of a number of organisations training coaches in the UK, including Coach U and the Industrial Society. However, says O’Donovan, only a few people make it through to the top end of the market to become a mentor. Most of these have a master’s degree in psychology or a similar qualification and years of experience of coaching and mentoring in business.

“You have to weed out those with what I call the Diana syndrome – people who really want to escape from their own problems,” says David Clutterbuck, head of Clutterbuck Associates, the mentoring consultancy. “You also need to weed out people who have been working in business for years and want to put something back. It’s often an excuse to spend an hour talking about themselves and about their own problems.”

The kind of successful and highly capable executive who employs a mentor will be critical of a mentor who promises a quick or miraculous fix. They want a non-doctrinal, pragmatic and consistent approach.

“Really effective mentors need high self-awareness to recognise and manage their own behaviour. They need reasonably good insight into patterns of behaviour. Laughter, used appropriately, is invaluable in helping people to develop rapport. In general, the broader the scope of knowledge and experience the mentor can apply, the better the sense of proportion he or she can bring.

More than any other role in management development, mentoring demands great flexibility and attention to the learner.”

In any psychological process, there is a danger that clients can be led into uncharted territory and left to flounder. There is no industry-wide mentoring professional body and no official exams or qualifications, although there are some moves towards accreditation and larger mentoring consultancies have their own internal checks. At Coutts, for instance, mentors meet supervisors to discuss cases every fortnight. Otherwise it is up to individual mentors to recognise their limits and to know when to refer their clients to someone else.

One advantage of the informal structure of the mentoring business is the wide spectrum of mentoring styles that it allows to thrive. Clients can pick the mentor whose approach they like best, but invariably the client/mentor relationship comes down to the simple matter of personality. “You either click or you don’t,” says Catherine McDowell. “Terry and I both come from Northern Ireland and we share the same kind of humour.”

The majority of mentors’ clients are used to looking to the bottom line for results. But how do you measure something as subjective as mentoring? The answer, according to O’Donovan, is simple. Clients know.

“You have to be good at what you do,” he says. “You are talking about people who are totally focused and they will vote with their feet. If you’re not delivering value, it’s “Thank you, but no thank you”.

* David Fish provides a bespoke service, which takes a variety of forms and fees.