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Succession Planning

Informality and Confidentiality Key to Successful Mentoring

Kellye Whitney

Less than a year ago, Avnet Inc. — one of the world’s largest distributors of semiconductors, connectors, passive and electromechanical components — began a mentoring program to create a link between talent development and succession planning.

“We feel it’s very important to provide development opportunities for all employees, whether they’re in a succession path or not,” said MaryAnn Miller, vice president of talent and organizational effectiveness at Avnet Inc.

Miller said succession planning is key, especially for the top three tiers of the company, but she wanted to create a program with a broader focus and a more disciplined process. When employee feedback from Avnet’s global employee survey confirmed additional development opportunities were appealing, she said she knew mentoring, as one piece of development in a robust talent management succession process, would be a competitive advantage.

Managers, she said, provide accountability with their feedback. Coaches provide knowledge-based feedback. With mentors, the relationship is all about fit, an interpersonal and confidential connection from people who have had challenges mentees will experience.

“In today’s workforce, with the technology and information overload, we don’t make as much time for one-on-one relationships, and people are really missing and seeing a need for that,” she said.

Matches in Avnet’s mentoring program are chemistry based, and the couplings are informally structured to avoid any unnecessary administrative strain. Too many requirements can burden the participants from the beginning, which can cause relationships to stagnate and the program to flounder. Miller said regular performance management and development planning processes, which are required of all managers, provide enough structure.

Also, mentors can give candid feedback in a safe environment because they’re not evaluating someone’s performance. But confidentiality is necessary because mentees should be free to discuss issues they may be nervous or hesitant to raise to their manager.

“We want people to share ideas with each other and not be bound by any hard and fast rules,” Miller explained. “Though we do have some guidelines that we give to the mentee and the mentor on how to make a mentoring relationship more effective.”

Another goal for Avnet’s mentoring program is to ensure the company has successors to fill key roles in the company’s transitioning workforce.

“We’re facing the same thing a lot of companies are with an aging workforce and people thinking about moving on and doing other things very soon,” she said. “We need to fill those key roles and build bench strength throughout the organization.”

Mentoring has filtered into other areas of the company. For instance, Miller said executives and leaders enjoy spending time mentoring young people who have joined the company’s internship program, and a lot of those relationships facilitate internal hires. Last year, she said, Avnet hired roughly a third of its 30 or so interns, and the mentoring relationships often continued post-hire.

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