Mentors May be the Key to Solving Retention, Diversity Problems

The concept of a 'mentor' goes all the way back to ancient Greece. Before going off to war, Homer's Odysseus asked his trusted friend Mentor to prepare his own son Telemachus to become king. If the tale were told today, would Odysseus have bypassed his buddy and simply used email to nurture the heir apparent?

Well, maybe, but that doesn't mean the immediacy of a face-to-face relationship between an established leader and an ambitious newcomer is outmoded in today's workplace. By no means, according to Suzanne Forsyth and Michele Fantt Harris, who spoke last week at the Society for Human Resource Management's Workplace Diversity Conference.

Mentors are as important for the second information age as they were in antiquity, Forsyth and Fantt Harris say, because they contribute to the acculturation of new employees, nurture good talent and support retention. Moreover, they say, a good mentor can help counteract disadvantages associated with being outside the dominant group -- which, in the American workplace, is still white males.

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