Our inaugural diversity webcast yielded a host of questions, far more than we had a chance to answer in the formal Q&A session that followed with Greg Case. Over the next few weeks, I’ll take a stab at answering some of them—or offer opinions where answers are wishful thinking.
Question: A few years back, there was a program called Mentium that I heard was terrific. At the time, I wasn’t eligible because you had to have 7 years of experience. Are there any programs like that in existence? Or in the planning stage?
Rebecca Drzewiecki—Southfield, MI
Answer: As Greg mentioned during the webcast, organizations known for top talent are great at mentoring their associates. It becomes part of their DNA, with each generation reaching out to cultivate the new talent coming into the organization. And employees are attracted to firms known for helping their people grow. So mentoring helps you hire and build great talent. It also gives employees a way to help themselves.
And that’s our diversity strategy: Hire the best, build the best, be the best.
Creating that kind of culture—implicitly as well as explicitly—doesn’t just happen. It takes effort and accountability and more than one way to reach people. While much informal mentoring already takes place in Aon, there are too many people in your place Rebecca. People who are either interested in finding a mentor or in reaching out to help others, yet they don’t know how to ask or offer. That’s why we’ve decided to implement the equivalent of a match.com strategy for mentoring. The Open Mentoring system that we will pilot this Fall makes it easy to find a mentor or a protégé and provides concrete tools to help manage the relationship.
But Open Mentoring is simply a tool. We must also work behind the scenes to ensure our senior talent makes time to mentor—and that we track who’s mentoring and how good they are at it. So we’ll be uploading mentor matching into our performance management system so we can track activity and results. And when Aon associates are invited to join one of our high performance development programs, we assign a mentor to them—and require them to, in turn, mentor two or three others. We’re also rolling out more and more local employee networking groups (BNGs) with a core focus on mentoring and development. Check the Knowledge Exchange for announcements on new BNGs or for info on how to start one near you!
Corbette Doyle
Chief Diversity Officer
