The evolution of mentoring

V Suresh

Today every industry is looking for candidates who are employable. And when you consider the kind of candidates being hired, at the entry level or beyond, there is a gap between the time they are employed and the time they are ‘billable’. That is where the concept of mentoring comes in. Earlier, freshers from campus were put through a fair amount of of organised training programmes like mock calls, role plays, etc. A lot of time was given to these activities.

But today, due to the rising pressures of productivity, competitiveness, cost cutting, the pressure on businesses to perform and the bench strength not being too huge (especially in the BPO/KPO arena), there is pressure on business leaders to hire and train people quickly, put them on the job and then constantly mentor them on the job. The time to train has shortened and instead, there is on-the-job-training, on-the-job-feedback and grooming of talent. In a world of social media, where there is instant gratification, patience levels are dropping so there is no time to get the fresh recruits job ready. Mentoring has become inevitable due to these factors and we see this trend in the pharmaceutical industry as well.

One more aspect is that technology is changing very fast. The impact of technology is not restricted to the IT industry but is felt across all industries. If you look at the pharma industry, there are mobile app companies which are developing apps which are helping doctors and patients. For instance, take the app which helps patients find alternative medicines brands to the one prescribed.

So technologies have become strategic enablers or disruptive innovations because of which mentoring need not only be for freshers/juniors. Mentoring may be required even for middle- and senior management as well as they will have to learn about these technologies from others in the company who are ‘early adopters’ or have adapted themselves to these technologies. So that is the framework of mentoring today.

Mentoring by example

Consider the specific challenges facing the pharma industry today. Firstly, it is a niche industry. All and sundry do not get into the pharma industry. A large number of entry level positions are at the medical representative (MR) level and these MRs have to imbibe skills and knowledge from their seniors while they are ‘on call’, visiting doctors to give them information about their company’s products. They have to understand each doctor’s psyche and this kind of information is not available from text books because it is both an art as well as a science. Each MR then develops his own style of developing a rapport/ relationship with a set of doctors. This is one area which in very unique to the pharma industry.

Another example unique to this industry is the research teams in pharma R&D labs. Teams of younger scientists, possibly on fellowships to do their PhDs, work under senior scientists, sometimes working on a particular problem for five to seven years continuously. They live, eat and sleep thinking about their research. During the course of this, the younger scientists start approaching research problems the way their guides do. They imbibe the thought processes and behavioural patterns of their seniors which then give them the confidence to explore unknown paths of research themselves. On the manufacturing side too, some skills can be picked up from manuals or during training sessions but most are learnt on the job.

Mentoring in the pharma industry is thus a very key process to pass knowledge from one generation to the next. People who enter the pharma industry generally do not leave because the knowledge gained is very specialised and specific to the industry.

Mentoring may not happen in a formal environment. Will a sales manager call his MR team into a conference room and give them tips on making cold calls to doctors? No, this happens on the field, as they travel to the doctors’ clinics. Once they are in the clinic’s reception, the process continues as they wait for permission to enter the doctor’s examination room. This is a fairly unique gurukul experience; a modern day equivalent of the way students stayed with their gurus and learnt many things from them. For industries like the pharma sector, especially functions where knowledge is more interpretative and not cast in stone, mentoring thus has a very special role to play. It is more about behavioural patterns that are observed rather than classroom learning. And in research labs, where both the senior research leader and the junior scientists are working on the same problem, it might also happen that the roles are reversed as the junior scientist might be more in tune with the newer technological aspects. So eventually the learning is both ways.

(As narrated to Viveka Roychowdhury)