Mentoring and shadowing are associated with significant benefits in the business world. This work seeks to explore the effects of shadowing and mentoring interventions designed for career development and advancement strategies.
Through discussion of Business Progress Management (BPM) practices, the members involved in practices, and the stakeholders in mentorship programs, the paper suggests that mentoring and shadowing are indeed vehicles for career advancement programs at Nike. BPM processes grant access to relevant career development tips through interacting with expatriates or old employees across departments in the organization (Service et al., 2018). Therefore, this work considers BPM practices as good intervention that meets the needs of career development approaches.
The preferred implementation strategy for Nike would be a combination strategy. Even though it might be costly, the strategy will be well-tailored for the career development project (Jeston & Nelis, 2018). At the onset of the program, data about all employees shall be gathered from the HR department. Such data involving performance appraisals, departmental data, and employee productivity would sort employees based on their experience. Three metrics shall be employed to assess the project’s success, including time required to complete a task, productivity rate, and production cost. These metrics would be important as they would stand as an overall test of the BPM project’s success.
Members to be Considered as Mentors
All members of BPM play a critical role towards supporting the process. BPM is defined as a management discipline-oriented with business processes to achieve significant organization’s objectives via performance management and critical governance of business processes (Jeston & Nelis, 2018). Mentors are key drivers in BPM projects as they assist in gathering resources such as work guidelines, making policies, and providing plan templates and starting points for the team (Jeston & Nelis, 2018).
Team members also consider themselves as mentors in the ongoing processes. However, this is not good as it is advisable not to involve all members in the mentoring process. People involved will take part in the mentoring and shadowing processes. If there are many people involved in them, it will result in confusion which may lead astray all members and make the process ineffective. Taking an example of the career development and advancement strategies, BPM processes will be adequately needed to improve the idea. Therefore, all BPM members should be involved but not all should be considered as mentors.
Mentees to Institutionalize the Change
A considerable number of stakeholders would be chosen for the career development strategies to act as mentees. In the underlying BPM strategy for Nike, managers, and supervisors would act as mentees to institutionalize the new processes. BPM can also be viewed as the constant and continuous implementation of new processes to sustain the organization in uncertain times and maintain the company’s profits. For the launch of the career development strategies to work effectively, money appropriation from the CEO, who in this case has the final authority on funds release, would be needed to fund the program.
The CEO in liaison with managers from various departments will offer symposiums for career talks deemed for career development strategies. The managers and supervisors would be at the frontiers of the training conducted as they are the ones behind induction and trainings. Induction programs are important for new employees to learn about the organization. The corporate CEO, managers, supervisors would be considered as the mentees to institutionalize the new processes.
Tracking and Assessing Changes
It will be important first to identify all involved parties and note that BPM implementation is a business way that will impact the business in the long run. Implementation of the career development strategies ensures the business’s well-being while simultaneously creating room for ongoing improvements in the business. If the new processes are not enforced to improve the strategies, there would be no reason to adopt the BPM process.
Shadowing has a wide array of benefits as far as the right mentor is aligned with the right mentee. Balance scorecards would act as a performance appraisal in the process of shadowing. Managers are tasked with overseeing the process within the facilities, monitoring the overall progress prompted by changes, and managing affected processes. When new employees are put under the supervision of expatriates, the new employee benefits a lot from the old employee’s experience as they are given a new start.
Shadowing can also be used to cross-train employees who are in different departments. With mentors and mentees shadowing, all employees would gain new ideas on how operations are conducted. Shadowing has also been found to be effective as it allows team members to learn about the group’s strengths and weaknesses (Nguyen, 2018). In the current BPM project, shadowing will ensure that all internal clients across the organization’s departments are provided with adequate skills as they are passed from one employee to another. Expatriates would be assigned to new employees to teach them about the company’s culture and how services are elicited.
Mentoring and shadowing would be significant in career development for a big company such as Nike. Even though all team BPM members play a critical role in the new processes, not all should be taken as mentors. Only the supervisors and managers should become mentors since including all members would bring confusion. As a way of tracking changes induced by the new processes, data will be elicited from the HR database of employee’s performance which will be aligned with scorecards. Shadowing will effectively be employed in Nike via cross-employee training where new employees will be placed with experienced employees to learn from them.
References
Jeston, J. & Nelis, J. (2018). Business process management (4th ed.). Pearson.
Nguyen, M. (2018). Cross-training for front-line employees in the hotel industry. Case study: Holiday Inn Helsinki City Centre. [Unpublished bachelor’s thesis]. Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences.
Service, B., Dalgic, G. E. & Thornton, K. (2018). Benefits of a shadowing/mentoring intervention for New Zealand school principals. Professional Development in Education, 44(4), 507-520. Web.