By Jeff Lewis
Today’s leaders aren’t born; they’re groomed – and not very well, according to Mary Donohue, adjunct professor of business administration at Dalhousie University. “The biggest problem is we don’t train leaders anymore,” she laments. “We just presuppose that people can lead.”
It’s a trend she hopes the National Mentoring Program can help reverse. “We don’t provide enough opportunities to fail in our society, and that’s why the NMP is so important,” she says.
The program pairs university-level business students with executives and managers from Molson Coors Brewing Company. The students complete paid internships with charities over a 16-week period. Molson Coors personnel work in an advisory role, meeting with students or talking to them by phone on a weekly basis in short 20-minute bursts. The mentors are a sounding board, Donohue says, there to help students navigate the sometimes-mysterious travails of office life. “No one really teaches that,” she says. “Kids have to learn it on their own.”
The program began as Donohue’s graduate dissertation at Central Michigan University. After working in the upper echelons of corporate communications and public relations, including a stint as executive director for the Molson Indy Festival Foundation, the 46-year-old headed back to school. She was eager to dig deeper into the relationship between mentor and protege. She also wanted to examine what impact philanthropy had on leaders. “Nobody in the world had really begun to look at the positive effects of mentoring on the mentor.”
The NMP gives managers a chance to test different leadership styles in an environment that’s free from everyday pressures. “It was built on an environment where you can test, you can fail and then you can succeed,” the professor says. “My goal is to train a million mentors over the next five to 10 years,” she adds.
The author’s experience teaching ethics and ethical leadership to undergraduates at Ryerson University in Toronto also influenced the shape and tenor of the NMP. Students today don’t trust businesses, Donohue says. Examples of corporate malfeasance have convinced many that the pursuit of a corner office isn’t worth the effort. The career path personified by Gordon Gekko – the fictional junk-bond dealer played by Michael Douglas in Oliver Stone’s 1987 movie Wall Street – has lost its cachet. The greed-is-good ethos championed by Douglas’s character (and pursued to tragic ends by the likes of Goldman Sachs and AIG) is, if not dead, certainly gasping for breath.
“Greed is totally OK, it’s great,” the professor says. “Everybody needs to make money. But you can also make money and help others, and that’s where mentoring comes in.”
Mentoring is also a great way to engage and build trust with young business talent. Millennial kids – also known as generation Y and echo boomers – too often get dismissed as whiners whose sense of entitlement is out of step with their place on the bottom rung of the corporate ladder. Donohue isn’t buying it. “These kids are going to grow up,” she says. “They’re going to be great.”
Emily Dimytosh is a testament to that belief. The 19-year-old bachelor of commerce student is midway through her second summer with the NMP. While most program participants complete a brief internship with a charity, Dimytosh used the experience as a springboard to launch her own environmental consulting agency.
She now manages a team of summer students as the program director for Practically Green Solutions. The Georgetown, Ont.-based outfit helps small businesses assess and overcome a range of environmental challenges, in areas like energy efficiency, procurement and waste management. Dimytosh says running her own business has allowed her to put classroom knowledge to use in a real-world setting.
“I’ve learned more in my eight months with the NMP than I have through almost three years at Queen’s School of Business,” she confesses.
Her fledgling company doesn’t turn a profit – yet. Seed money came from the NMP, which initially kicked in $7,000. Dimytosh used the support to raise an additional $12,000 through the YMCA of Greater Toronto’s eco-internship program. Another $6,000 came from the federal government. The young entrepreneur credits her mentors at the NMP for helping the startup business build a website and foster connections with the local chamber of commerce.
Are potential clients startled by an enterprising student barely eligible to vote peddling lofty concepts like sustainability and corporate social responsibility? “I’ll admit when you first walk into a room there’s always that moment of shock.”
But reservations invariably give way to nods of approval as Dimytosh presents a measured business plan that’s crafted especially for small businesses. There are lots of opportunities for companies to burnish their environmental credentials, she says. “But I also know that as small business owners they’re wearing many hats already and [can’t] add another one.”
It’s exactly this kind of know-how that puts a smile on Jeremy Kalenuik’s face. “It’s quite satisfying to be able to help a student along and help them understand how the workforce works,” he says.
Kalenuik, a planning and execution assistant manager at Molson Coors in Edmonton, is a first-time mentor with the NMP. Since April, he’s worked with a third-year business student from the University of Alberta who volunteers with the YWCA. She checks in by phone each Friday. “I’m there for support and guidance,” Kalenuik says.
gen-Y isn’t your average crop of understudies, however. In three months of weekly meetings, Kalenuik, 31, admits he’s had to rethink the way he communicates with someone who’s grown up completely ensconced in platforms like Google, Facebook and Twitter. The experience has been challenging. “It certainly helped me understand that different people upload information in different ways,” he says.
Workplace managers had better learn to bridge such generational divides – and quickly, Donohue says. “Once these students get into the workplace, you actually have to know how to speak with them, and that becomes your problem as a boss,” she says.
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Amazing to hear. Keep up the good work Emily!!!