Early in my career, when I worked at Seagate, they ran me through an extensive mentoring program where I had direct access to a senior director of the company. More often, I find that there is a tremendous shortage of mentoring programs and people acting like mentors within corporations.

Often the issue is that time is too short or budgets are too tight.

And far too often, managers are promoted and told to manage large teams while retaining the same responsibilities they held as individual contributors, and with no additional management training.  I frequently hear young managers saying “I remember how nice it was to be an individual contributor” or “I don’t like babysitting.”

How sad.

Before we all give up and say “if the company doesn’t care about mentoring, why should I?” How about we say, “let’s bring back mentoring, even if the company doesn’t recognize how important it is to its long-term success.

Here’s my help wanted advertisement that should serve as a reminder of the purpose of mentoring for any of you that have never had the privilege of being part of a mentoring relationship, or hardly remember what it was like, because it was so many years ago.

Help Wanted… Seeking inspired individuals that want to make strong connections at work.

Anyone that wants to apply, must support the following goals:

• Help needed educating individual contributors about the strategic direction of the company to ensure alignment between executive management goals and the work actually being done.
• Help needed taking top raw talent of the company and turning them into future leaders.
• Help needed creating deeper, more satisfying relationships at work to foster camaraderie and employee retention.

How does that sound?