Now, Your Mentor Is Way Across Town

Anyone who has worked longer than a week knows the importance of mentors. They advise you on career development, guide you through the corporate jungle and champion your cause, helping to position you for promotions or high-profile assignments.

But today, the traditional belief that mentors can be found in the big office down the hall no longer is true. First, downsizings have obliterated the concept of lifetime employment and removed many of the people who, in earlier times, would have been ideal mentors.

Second, the uncertain economic climate has escalated the level of internal competition.

As a result, more employees are looking for mentors outside their companies. This new wave of mentoring is taking a variety of forms - through professional organizations and through more formal programs, such as Women’s Organization for Mentoring, Education and Networking (WOMEN Unlimited Inc.), in Forest Hills, N.Y.

Now in its third year, the program operates in New York and Boston and soon will expand to San Francisco. It has plans for eventual outposts in other cities. Companies pay $3,000 to send employees to this yearlong program providing leadership and management training, skills assessment and senior-level mentors (women and men) to counsel participants in monthly sessions.

“We’d all like to get support from people inside our companies, but it’s not always safe to seek their feedback,” says founder Jean M. Otte, a former executive with National Car Rental System Inc.

“Managers tend not to be really honest because they may feel threatened (by your ambition), or they may not feel comfortable discussing the very thing that could hold you back, such as your grooming or a nervous habit. Plus, managers are so busy with their own work that they really don’t have time to sit down with an employee and say, ‘How can I help you?”’

WOMEN Unlimited’s expansion comes at a time when other high-profile mentoring initiatives are waning. Clairol’s widely touted national program, which matched young women with leaders in fields ranging from fashion to journalism, recently became a casualty of budget cuts. And the Destiny Institute, in Chicago, founded by cosmetics entrepreneur Marilyn Miglin, has put its mentoring effort on hold.

Merrie Spaeth, president of Spaeth Communications, in Dallas, says the kind of external mentoring that WOMEN Unlimited is facilitating is most effective for learning skills and making connections.

“(It) should be attached to a specific skill enhancement,” says Spaeth, author of “Marketplace Communication” (MasterMedia, $17.95) and a mentor to two MBA candidates at Southern Methodist University. “Find someone who can teach you what’s cutting-edge in your industry. An external mentor also can help you change jobs. When you’re interested in moving on, you can’t go to the division president and say, ‘Hey, Bob. I’m bored.”’

WOMEN Unlimited has trained what Otte calls “emerging women” from myriad companies, including Revlon Inc., Coopers & Lybrand, New England Life and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Participants attend monthly classes on topics ranging from decision-making to time management to budgeting.

For Ademi McCullum, the chief benefits of WOMEN Unlimited have been the role-playing scenarios and one-on-one coaching from her mentor, a director of information technology at a New York City bank.

“He’s advised me to focus on people skills because as a technical person I tend to spend all my time with computers,” says McCullum, lead systems analyst for Public Service Electric & Gas, in Newark, N.J.

Otte’s program trains about 100 women a year and offers scholarships to those from nonprofit organizations. “I’m trying to create a feeder system (for) women in their 20s or 30s with little or no management experience,” she says. “These women need to learn the skills required for the majors before they’re put in the jobs. I want to position them for long-term success.”