BOSCH

A story of engineering: breaking silos through the Mentoring Programme at BOSCH

This case study is featured in the book Mentoring with a Coaching Attitude: International Corporate Mentorship that Works. In it, Piotr Ciacek, managing partner at STIBITZ, authors a chapter on implementing mentoring programs in Poland.

BOSCH

About the company

Robert Bosch GmbH, is a German multinational engineering and technology company based in Gerlingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The company was founded by Robert Bosch in Stuttgart in 1886.

Bosch’s main business areas include four business sectors: mobility (hardware and software), consumer goods (including white goods and power tools), industrial technology (including drives and controls), and energy and building technology. In addition, it is the largest service provider in Poland and worldwide.

Robert Bosch is one of the most stable employers in Poland, with people who have worked there for 15-20 years. Turnover is low and growth steady – based both on sustainable, tested procedures and a conscience effort to innovate. I was put in contact with Bosch through the Business Leader Foundation, with which I used to cooperate as a supervisor of their mentoring programme, a programme in which Bosch employees – the head of HR and the CEO – took part as mentors. They asked me if I would like to introduce a programme at their company, with five directors as mentors and ten mentees. The programme sponsor would be the CEO and her right-hand woman, the HR Director.

Set up

First, I met the CEO. She was experienced and had quite a clear conception and ideas about the programme.  It would begin with the Hogan test for the mentors, followed by setting the goals the mentees were to work towards during the process, in agreement with their supervisors. In this way, the bosses of the mentees would be drawn into the process and would indirectly be judging the results achieved by both the mentees and the mentors. 

This conception was very much in line with the culture of the corporation, but would distort the essence of the mentoring process, which is founded on three principles:  it must be voluntary, there must be complete confidentiality, and the mentee must be able to change the goal during the process. The process described by the CEO would not guarantee confidentiality. Worse still, it would subject both the mentors and mentees to unnecessary control. In this way, the programme would not comply with EMCC principles, or with my own.

On the other hand, Bosch offered me a very tempting nugget, and I knew that if I agreed to the conditions proposed by the CEO, I would get the contract. But I didn’t want to go for such a compromise. I knew I would feel bad about it, and that it wouldn’t be good for the client, either – it could be the end of mentoring at Bosch for many years, or at least until the next CEO…

What was crucial was to understand the risks of the new programme for the organisation, how these were perceived by the CEO, and to find out what effect the stakeholders expected the programme to have. So, I told the CEO that I’d make a firm offer after getting to know the company’s culture better. The CEO left it at that and turned me over to the head of HR.

At my meeting with her, I asked for a list of key people in the organisation I could talk with about the corporate culture who would be involved in some way with the potential mentoring process. I was given a list of ten people: the CEO, the HR Director, the Talent Manager, Directors of Trade, middle managers, and potential mentees.

The interviews turned out to be a great idea. The organisation ran like a well-oiled machine. Everyone knew their place, procedures were clear and adapted to reality, employees knew what they had to do to advance and what not to do… People treated each other with trust and respect. Nevertheless, through its system of ‘divisions’, the company had created permanent ‘silos’ – hermeneutic ‘mini-companies’ within the corporation. While there was a free flow of communication within a given silo, there was practically none between silos. The firm did not make full use of its own experience since nothing was shared among different departments or divisions. This was conductive to an unspoken rivalry between divisions – each headed by an experienced leader who had been associated with Bosch for many years. Internally, then, it looked something like a football league where everyone is playing the same game in the same organisation, but each team a bit differently, and a bit against the others. Naturally, rivalry is needed, and can help an organisation grow, but at the same time, without cooperation and sensible means of transferring knowledge, it can turn dysfunctional. (also look at ref: Arshad Ali “Corporate Mentoring changing the paradigm”)

I had a meeting with the CEO and HR Director at which I presented my conclusions from the interviews. They took it well; in fact, they told me that the main aim of the mentoring programme was to “break up those silos, instigate horizontal communication, transfer knowledge and best practice among divisions, integrate employees”. In which case, I suggested, the form of the programme initially proposed would have no chance of achieving those things. Both the mentors and mentees would be striving for goals that were not their own but came from their ‘silo’. They would be working in closed pairs, without exchanging experience with other pairs, and so there would be no integration among mentors. Finally, if this was to be a programme for developing talent, we had to assume that, if things went well, one indicator of this would be mentees changing their goal, and that it’s absolutely vital for motivation that a mentee work towards a goal they have set for themselves and internalised. I also mentioned the discomfort the mentors would experience: while it was fine for them to have a mentee from another division, it was unacceptable to have the mentee’s line manager set the goals or assess whether the mentor had led the mentee towards achieving them.

THE OFFER

My arguments hit home, and I was asked to come up with a programme that could achieve the goals defined by the CEO and HR Director.

My proposal was as follows:

A. Selection and preparation of mentors

  1. Individual analysis of the level of soft skills and motivation of the mentors (interview of up to two hours)
  2. Hogan diagnostic tests for the mentors
  3. Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI)
  4. Hogan Development Survey (HDS)
  5. An inventory of motives, values and preferences (MVPI); discussion of the results achieved by the mentors with a certified Hogan consultant in the presence of the project supervisor (1.5-2-hour session) *
  6. Initial session combined with a discussion of the mentees’ EASI test results**

B. Programme candidates pairing session

In Mentor / Mentee pairs (2-hour meeting)- based on the application questionnaires.

C. Preparation of mentors

Six-hour workshop based on my EQA Mentor Foundation training module.

D. Supervision of mentors

Mastermind Group workshops (once per quarter) *- each about 3 hours, conducted by me;
Individual supervisions for the mentors.

E. Supervision of mentees

Feedback session with mentees (once per quarter).
Telephone consultations on an ad hoc basis.

F. Closing session and programme evaluation

Programme evaluation consists of a presentation of the results of anonymous surveys completed by the mentees and mentors at the end of the programme.


At the same time, I proposed a number of guiding principles for the programme as a pre-condition for my participation.

  • The mentors and programme sponsors must familiarise themselves with and sign the EMCC ethical code
  • The process must be confidential
  • The company must inform employees about the programme in a clear manner, with particular emphasis on the criteria in accordance with which mentors and mentees are invited to take part
  • No mentee can be paired up with a mentor to whom the mentee reports or who has direct influence on the mentee’s career path, whether they are given a pay rise/bonus, etc.

The programme also contained a time frame, and was to run for no longer than eight months, whereas the pairs should meet no more than once a week and no less than once a month.

THE WORK

Five pairs began working together. In accordance with the Schedule, the programme began with a discussion on the results of the Hogan tests, conducted by a certified user of that tool, in my presence (with the mentor’s consent). The test results were not revealed to anyone else.

I must admit that this was a valuable experience – both for the mentors and for me. I observed their reactions to information that was not always easy to hear. This usually involved a description of the situations in which those weaknesses appear – which provided me with a pretext for introducing an element of mentor self-reflection in the process.

Another positive element of the Hogan tests was that they prepared the participants for corrective feedback from me. I referred to the tests during our supervisions, showing at the same time how they could give their mentees’ feedback (assessing behaviour, not the person).

The third benefit for me was being able to see the personality profile of the mentors, which made it easier to communicate with them later on and establish a relationship with them before the training day. In this way, the group entered into the training process very quickly and smoothly.

I was very surprised to learn during the training that the participants found themselves all together for the first time (each of them had been working at Bosch Polska for more than fifteen years). And that this was their first-ever training that was ‘soft’, not strictly technical.

They treated the programme as an ‘exploration into the unknown’, and I encouraged them to do so. It was particularly difficult in the beginning for them to speak about themselves, their thoughts and emotions, to ask open questions, to focus on the other person while remaining in contact with themselves. Some of them found it very moving to discover their own mental maps and the significant differences that existed between members of the group. The process was able to move forward thanks to their mutual good will, openness, sense of humour, and the fact that they all discovered that no one in the room was ‘better’ than the others.

It was hard for them to accept that there would be no KPIs in the mentoring process, and that the mentees could look for their goal over three sessions and then change it at any time during the process. They instinctively tended to want to ‘programme’ the process and take responsibility for the result.

You can’t change old habits during a single training, though. For me what was key was that they understand why it was worth working on such a change, that they discover the sense of working in another tempo, style and paradigm.

In this context, the mastermind sessions were especially useful. The mentors began cooperating with each other. They saw that they have similar problems, doubts about their own competencies and the quality of this new type of work of theirs. I made sure that, apart from being confidential, the meetings were run in an atmosphere of relative freedom, were not too long (up to 2 hours) and were relevant. Of course, I had a plan I’d prepared, but I preferred that they raise topics/questions/problems. We worked out a system for searching for options and alternative solutions, and in this way, I taught them techniques for working with their mentees.

Another particularly difficult element for the mentors was how to perceive progress and particular traits in their mentees, and how to give them feedback that would motivate and strengthen them. “Here we don’t pat people on the back; doing something well is just considered doing your duty, and for that you get paid, not praised.”

When everyone had proposed their own solutions/ideas, I changed the group into a ‘group of experts’ whose task was to evaluate each of the options put forward.

The participants quickly began to go beyond conventional thinking. By the end of the second session, it was clear they’d formed a kind of ‘support group’, and after the third session, for the first time in history they went out together for a beer.

Over time, they began to see that each of them had their own unique, individual style and different skills – which they began to share with each other and mutually benefit from.

All of the mentoring processes ended successfully. That did not mean in every case that the mentee achieved their goal during the process, but it did mean that each began an autonomous journey towards that goal, using their own resources and accompanied by their mentor.

Outcomes

After eight months of the programme, most of the initial goals were achieved:

  • ntegration and transfer of knowledge and experience among departments at three levels:

Directors, managers, HR

  • Building talent within the company
  • Increased innovation
  • Better use of the unique talents of the mentees and mentors
  • Acquisition by the mentors of new leadership skills – development of autonomy and initiative among their employees
  • Implementation of best practice in their departments or other departments

During the preparation of the second edition of the programme, the existing CEO left the company. The new CEO invited me for a talk, but at that time wasn’t interested in continuing the programme. One year later, he got back to me and asked: “What do I have to do take a course as a mentor?”.

“Just sign up,” I said.

Since December, the current CEO of Bosch Polska has been a certified mentor at EMCC Foundation level and, as he put it, “I haven’t said the final word on the subject yet”.

We’re starting up again.