Formal mentoring relationships gain momentum over time

Thesupport that mentors offer can have considerable benefits, for boththeir proteges and the organisation at large. Recognising this, manydevelop formal mentoring programs to encourage and manage thisprocess. However, such a managed system provides different conditionsto an informal one, where parties identify an alignment of person andcircumstance. Frankie Weinberg and Melenie Lankau at the Universityof Georgia decided to explore what this means for mentorcontributions within formal mentoring relationships.

Weinbergand Lankau worked with a voluntary nine month mentoring program wherementor-protege pairs were formed by the organisation's executivecommittee; 110 such pairs joined their research. Questionnaires wereused to understand how much time mentors dedicated to therelationship, and how much they felt they were fulfilling variousmentoring functions: providing career guidance, psychosocial support,and role modelling good behaviours.

Mentoringrelationships are understood to move through phases, so the authorssampled mentors views twice: two months into the program and onemonth after its end. This allowed study of the initiation phase,where each party gets the feel of the other, and the followingcultivation phase, which insight and the relationship deepens.Mentoring activity is expected to be optimised during the cultivationphase, so Weinberg and Lankau investigated the relationship betweenthe time spent on mentoring, and the mentoring functions on offer.Time spent on mentoring increased all three mentoring functions duringinitiation (time one), but by the cultivation phase, time expendedwas even more strongly associated with enhanced mentoring function,suggesting an hour of mentoring is worth more during cultivation thanduring initiation.

Weinbergand Lankau were concerned that mixed-sex pairs may suffer in aformalised context, as weaker resemblance can lead mentors to investless effort than when working with a 'younger version of me'. Indeed,during the initiation period, mentors paired with proteges of theother sex overall reported providing lower levels of all threementoring functions. However, once they had reached the cultivationstage, these mixed-sex penalties disappeared for psychosocial supportand role-modelling, suggesting that increased familiarity managed toerode some of these barriers.

Thisstudy clearly evidences how formal mentoring relationships gainmomentum: after the initiation phase, investments into therelationship yield greater dividends and impediments to therelationship tend to be shucked off. So organisations consideringformal mentoring should ensure that the relationships they cultivatehave the time that they need to blossom.

Weinberg, F., & Lankau, M. (2010). Formal Mentoring Programs: A Mentor-Centric and Longitudinal Analysis Journal of Management, 37 (6), 1527-1557 DOI: 10.1177/0149206309349310

Charisma involves teachable behaviours

Is charisma innate or can we acquire it? This question has preoccupied scholars of leadership certainly since Max Weber proposed it was a gift "not accessible to everybody" over a century ago. Research suggests charismatic leadership - the use of ideology and emotion to rouse feeling and motivations - involves explicit behaviours, such as body language techniques, showing moral conviction and using metaphor. Is it possible to teach these so-called charismatic leader tactics (CLTs), and does this lead to higher attributions of charisma? There have been promising studies, but to date there hasn't been a study that investigated mature working adults and used a control group.

Enter a team from the University of Lausanne, headed by John Antonakis. Their first study recruited 34 managers who underwent a 360-degree process, each receiving ratings of charisma and leadership prototypicality (how much they resemble a leader) from themselves and around ten other co-workers. One month later, half the managers experienced a charisma training intervention, which included presentation of the various CLTs and practical sessions. Three months after the intervention, all managers again received 360 ratings using an altered rating scale to avoid undue influence from the last process. Managers who underwent training saw their charisma ratings significantly grow, relative to those who didn't.

There remained a possibility that these effects weren't the result of CLTs but due to raised confidence or self-awareness due to the training. So a second, study looked directly at the effects of CLTs in a controlled laboratory setting. 41 participants from an MBA course made speeches as part of their course requirements. After a bout of charisma training, they were asked to give the speech again, making changes in light of the training but preserving its core content. Films of every speech were given to trained coders who determined how many of the CLTs were present in a given speech, confirming they were more frequent after the training. Speeches with more CLTs - determined by the coder group - received higher ratings from a separate rater group on trust, competence, influence, affect (emotion) and leader prototypicality.

The authors emphasise there are no quick fixes - the training involved a real commitment of time - and that inexperienced overuse of CLTs can lead to self-parody, with pantomime hand gesture and excruciating metaphor. But as the study demonstrates, charisma is at least partly the result of adopting tactics that are transferable and learnable.

Antonakis, J., Fenley, M., & Liechti, S. (2011). Can Charisma Be Taught? Tests of Two Interventions The Academy of Management Learning and Education, 10 (3), 374-396 DOI: 10.5465/amle.2010.0012

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For those interested, here are the Charismatic Leader Tactics: the verbal techniques

• framing through metaphor
• stories and anecdotes
• demonstrating moral conviction
• sharing the sentiments of the collective
• setting high expectations
• communicating confidence
• using rhetorical devices such as contrasts, lists, and rhetorical questions

together with non-verbal tactics such as body gesture, facial expression, and animated voice tone.