Alumni Mentors Guide Students Through Their Final Year

AUTHOR: Sarah Mills   DATE: 14.09.05   ISSUE 2, 2005

MBA students are typically high achievers, confident in their power to post strong individual performances but from a management viewpoint, team performance is the true test of their metal. As former PepsiCo CEO D.Wayne Calloway once said: “We hire eagles and teach them to fly in formation.”

“We hire eagles and teach them to fly in formation.” Wayne Calloway, Former CEO PepsiCo.
ILLUSTRATION: Gregory Baldwin

Some students do fly through the team component presented in their Executive Year (EY) but for others, it can be an extremely taxing experience as personalities and priorities clash. Recognising the need to minimise these instances, AGSM developed the Alumni Mentoring Program to help students navigate what may prove the trickiest challenge of their degree.

The Alumni Mentoring Program was established in 2002 in recognition of the need to support students and was developed out of groundbreaking AGSM research that is creating new educational pathways around team management processes to help by-pass the role of personality in organisational teams.

AGSM developed the Alumni Mentoring Program to help students navigate what may prove the trickiest challenge of their degree.

It has been so successful that senior managers from many of Australia’s largest organisations have seen fit to volunteer their time as mentors to EY students. As former EY students, these Alumni have been through the processes, encountered the positives and pitfalls and know what it takes to get over the line – and sometimes, they say, that can be a lot.

“Nothing prepares you for people management,” says Tracey. “You can read about it and study situational leadership but in the final analysis you have to do it."

Tracey Hamilton, National Marketing and Category Manager Australia for Starbucks, is fortunate in that her experience was comprised nearly entirely of highs, and she sums up the challenges.

“Nothing prepares you for people management,” says Tracey. “You can read about it and study situational leadership but in the final analysis you have to do it. It is probably like driving a car.

“The biggest challenge you find is that people are motivated differently and diverse personalities are always a challenge. There are extroverts and introverts, agreeable people and people who tend to disagree. By having a variety of people and personalities in a team, you get more dynamic results. If the team members are too similar it may be that you miss out on better options.”

This is the crux of the issue. To create a valid managerial learning experience, personalities in a syndicate need to be sufficiently different to emulate a corporate environment and to contribute to superior team outcomes, but as a strategy, it is inherently fraught.

The stakes are high in the EY. Students work hard to be admitted and those who have graduated to the EY are some of the brightest minds in the Asia Pacific.

A 'syndicate' is a group of 4-6 students who study together for their EY. The students work as a team sharing their skills and collectively completing assignments.

Typically, when a syndicate doesn’t perform as planned, people blame others for failing to contribute. There is plenty of room for blame given students come to the syndicate – and the workplace - with vastly differing personalities, expectations, objectives and perspectives. Students come from diverse backgrounds and industries and some students may be more interested in gaining high marks than learning.

Mentors suggest that the potential for personality problems in the EY may even be higher than in the workforce given a natural if unusual coalition of circumstances.

The Alumni Mentoring Program includes 74 mentors who support 56 syndicates comprising 336 students.

The stakes are high in the EY. Students have worked hard to be admitted and individuals who have graduated to the EY are some of the brightest minds in the Asia Pacific. They are used to success and staging commendable individual academic performances. So to stumble at the final barrier because of a failure of the team to perform can be singularly difficult.

Syndicate formation takes place during the first two days of an off-campus residential program where students undergo a range of indoor and outdoor team challenges, personality tests and other objective alignment tests. AGSM Faculty encourage students when forming syndicates to aim for a mix of personalities to try and replicate a corporate environment.

Despite this process personality clashes and conflict are inevitable. However, unlike an organisation, where managers must play the hand they are dealt, AGSM coaches syndicate members to ensure the syndicate is able to deal with conflict. This not only enhances the learning experience for EY students but improves the chances of creating high-performance teams. This is the where the mentors come in. The Alumni Mentoring Program for 2005 includes 74 mentors who support 56 syndicates comprising 336 students.

“I'm involved with supporting students via the mentor program and other initiatives so their syndicate experience is one of learning and not agony.”

PHOTO: Taek Yang (Denise Weinreis)

Denise Weinreis, the program’s professional coach, says the role of the mentor is to assist by setting in place processes and systems that help bypass personality and cultural differences, to help minimise misunderstandings and enhance the learning experience.

“I'm involved with supporting students via the mentor program and other initiatives so their syndicate experience is one of learning and not agony,” says Weinreis. “People and personalities make collective learning a challenge so we give students structures to focus on skills as well as tools, this is so that personality will not rule - because personality will rule in weak situations.”

AGSM coaches syndicate members to ensure they are able to deal with conflict, enhancing the learning experience and improving the chances of creating a high-performance team.

Mentors find the mixture of bright minds, strong personalities and high stakes in the EY a potent cocktail – an experience that is both rewarding and challenging.

For mentor Chris Foote, EDS Asia Pacific Regional Capacity Executive (MBA Executive 2001), his motivation to join the program stemmed from his desire to improve on his personal EY experience.

“I was in a cohort that experienced considerable grief,” says Foote. “The EY comes with expectations and AGSM recognised the need to deal with some of the unexpected outcomes of the team projects.

“The idea of the Alumni Mentoring Program was to make the EY a more enjoyable learning experience rather than having to find your way through the fog. As mentors, we were learning in slow increments, then the school recruited Denise Weinreis to put some structure around the program. Now it has progressed to the point that it is nearly self sustaining.”

Rudy Van der Korput finished his EY in 2003 and returned to mentor a number of syndicates, earning the title “Mentor of the Year” in 2004.

Rudy Van der Korput finished his EY in 2003 and returned to mentor a number of syndicates, earning the title “Mentor of the Year” in 2004. He immensely enjoyed the positive feedback from students and the opportunity the program presented for self development: even the lows were a positive learning experience.

“The lows are when syndicates get into trouble - seeing the pain and the angst – the ‘you did this, no you didn’t’ altercations,” says Van der Korput. “Some situations go too far before proper intervention. People let it go assuming team members will meet their commitments but you just can’t do that.

“I heard of a situation where team members believed one team member was not contributing. But it went on for a long time and they tried to deal with it in their way. This member was a ‘black sheep’ in that he was different to the rest. They called a meeting very late in the year and asked their mentor to facilitate. It was four versus one. But that was their learning experience. You can learn from both positive and negative experiences.”

Foote tells a similar story.

“I had five syndicates, all of them different,” says Foote. “Some were comprised totally of alpha males, others had less ambition and were more focused on enjoying the course and others were ‘didn’t care’ groups. Each syndicate develops its own personality.

“It is nearly always about personalities. There are a lot of high achievers and the degree is costly. So anything that gets in the road of some individuals is given short shrift. Some students will shed teachers, team members and mentors. It is important to understand personalities or they creep up and hit you in the back of the neck.

“I heard of a syndicate with four alpha males and one who was pretending to be but wasn’t. The mentor wasn’t backgrounded on the situation and was just asked to facilitate the meeting, and two of the students just launched into the pretend-alpha student. The mentor had to patch him up and get him back on board.”

Both Foote and Van der Korput agree that the mentor’s role is to help their teams get across the line, and there are a number of hurdles on the way. The key to syndicate success, they say, is to establish a series of processes that help minimise the role personalities play in the team.

“The EY is very different and there can be pitfalls you can walk into if you do not know where you are going,” says Van der Korput. “The workload starts at a reasonable pace but if you are not organised, you very quickly fall back and then it can be nearly impossible to make up the lost ground. By the second semester it becomes more challenging. There are a lot more assessments and the deadlines are crammed more tightly.

“That is why it is really important to get the team processes working well because you do not have time by the second semester to think ‘is our team right?’ If you do not have your team humming by then, it is a real drag.

“Managing different demands is also a challenge. There are individual tasks as well as team tasks to complete. You have to get the right balance between self-driven and team-driven priorities. Some teams support the individual side of things, others focus only on the team.

“Another pitfall to be aware of is that some aspects can be quite technical. For example, in my EY, two of us went away and built a massive model but then when we came back towards the end of the year, nobody could understand it because they hadn’t been involved in its development and we found we could not explain it easily.”

"It is really important to get the team processes working well because you do not have time by the second semester to think ‘is our team right?'"

A more recent addition to the Alumni Mentoring Program has been the introduction of mentor advisors. These advisors are essentially ‘mentors to the mentors’. Of the 74 mentors in 2005, eight are mentor advisors, with no syndicates. They were introduced as back-up support for mentors experiencing challenges similar to those above.

Originally, Denise Weinreis was the primary co-ordinator and as the number of volunteer mentors grew from just 20 in 2002 to nearly 74 in 2004, the role became too big for Denise to manage herself. Each mentor advisor assists a cohort of 42 students, is a dedicated and committed Alumni mentor with two years experience who has received consistent, confirming feedback from their syndicates.

“I love it. It is a challenge to put together a team of mentors and you get a lot of satisfaction from the feedback from the team." Ben Maguire

Ben Maguire, Manager Energy Shop Channel AGL (MBA Executive 2003) is a mentor advisor.

“Being a mentor advisor is an opportunity to coach the mentors and I guess I apply the mentoring skills and learnings across the group as opposed to just the syndicate,” says Ben.

"You have to get the right balance between self-driven and team-driven priorities."

“I love it. It is a challenge to put together a team of mentors and you get a lot of satisfaction from the feedback from the team and how they are delivering value to the syndicates.”