The Hindu Business Line : `Mentoring is key to success'

Mentors are ordinary people who make a difference to others' lives. Through their guidance and care, they effectively bring magical transformation within people, helping them harness their latent potential.

Launching `Mentoring', a practitioner's guide to touching lives, authored by Dr Sunil Unny Guptan and published by Sage, Mr G.V. Prasad, CEO of Dr Reddy's Lab, said that even minor traits such as listening to people patiently or buttoning a sleeve, or a host of non-verbal communication that one tends to ignore, can be learnt from mentors.

Tracing his company's journey from a startup, finding its feet and becoming the fourth best employer in the country, Mr Prasad said that this would not have been possible without mentoring within the organisation at various levels, which has helped create a well-knit matrix of professionals.

The top three best employers are IT companies and Dr Reddy's tops the manufacturing sector.

Dr Guptan's book, which draws upon real-life experiences, seeks to unravel the entire mentoring process, from building a mentor-mentored relationship to aligning this concept to organisational goals.

While many corporations seek to institutionalise this aspect, they often tend to confuse this with building leaders.

So, can one appoint a mentor? No, says Dr Guptan, as mentoring is a different beast and needs to be voluntary. Mentors also learn from the mentored, who help them reconfigure.

If the mentors in IT companies were successful, there would not be the kind of attrition witnessed in the IT sector, Dr Guptan said. The book itself took only a few weeks to write, but it packs years of mentoring, he added.

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