Improving the Air Force Mentoring Program

The Air Force mentoring program finds its foundation in AFI 36-3401, which provides the fundamentals for mentoring, broken out into 10 paragraphs. For a number of reasons to include faulty assumptions, a demand for immediate results and the issues associated with the all too common practice of "square filling", the mentoring program has waned. The concepts of mentoring have existed for a long time, yet only recently, within the past decade or so, have the concepts really come into their own for corporations. The Air Force began, in good faith, pursuing these concepts about seven years ago when it published the first iteration of the AFI. Because the AFI denoted a leadership directed program, rather than a leadership led culture, the concepts of mentoring have not taken hold, as they should have. One can pull "best practices" on mentoring from an endless number of sources such as corporations, government agencies and sports teams. This paper will look primarily at the best practices found at the Virginia Military Institute and International Business Machines. These two entities have mentoring solutions that are in essence a mind-set or culture imbedded in its students or employees as the case may be, rather than just a program as is currently found in the AF. If one were to take these best practices and meld them together with the information and processes found in the AFI, the Air Force mentoring program could easily grow from just a program to an all encompassing mind-set or culture; a culture of continuous learning and improvement. Some examples of these improvements include more responsibility being taken by the prot g for his/her own betterment instead of relying solely on the mentor to provide everything; who precisely should be the mentor; is the immediate supervisor the best choice, or is there someone that could provide a better mentoring environment.