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The mentors and mentees assigned by HR frequently don't click. Too much structure - training, guidelines, questionnaires, paperwork - frequently suffocates everyone involved. Conversely, too little structure can lead to lousy mentors, poor communication, and mentees who operate under the delusion that their mentor will not only get them promoted, but solve all their life's problems. There are some mentoring programs that, against all odds, do succeed. Take the one at Ernst & Young. The U.S. arm of the $14.5 billion tax and audit giant didn't get serious about mentoring until 1996, shortly after it realized it had a big problem: Its women weren't getting the guidance from partners that was crucial for women to become partners themselves someday. In 1997, soon after joining Ernst & Young full-time, Deborah Holmes launched a pilot mentoring program just for women who directly serve clients in either the tax or audit practices in the firm's Upper Midwest region. The program was rolled out nationwide the following year. She established two tracks: one program for women with more than five years' experience, and one for women with less.

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"Most formal mentoring programs suck," says Noel Tichy, professional of organizational behavior at Michigan University and former director of GE Crotonville, General Electric's well-known leadership school in Ossining, N.Y. The mentors and mentees assigned by HR frequently don't click, as you know all too well if you've participated in such a program. Too much structure-training, guidelines, questionnaires, paperwork-frequently suffocates everyone involved. Conversely, too little structure can lead to lousy mentors, poor communication, and mentees who operate under the delusion that their mentor will not only get them promoted, but solve all their life's problems. "It is just as important to say what a mentor is not, as what a mentor is," says Joan Caruso, managing director at New York-based workplace consultancy The Ayers Group.

Carol Muller is the founder of MentorNet, an online network hosted by the College of Engineering at San Jose State University in San Jose, Calif. The network connects women pursuing science and engineering degrees with professionals at companies like IBM and Cisco Systems. "Sometimes they need therapy, not a mentor," quips Muller. Still, despite its complexities, there is no denying the value of mentoring-if it's done right.

Catalyst is a nonprofit research organization with offices in New York, San Jose, Calif, and Toronto that promotes opportunities for women and minorities in the workplace. Catalyst's 2002 survey of minority women ("Women of Color in Corporate Management: Three Years Later") found that 69 percent of those who had mentors in 1998 had at least one upward move by 2001, compared to 49 percent of those without a mentor. Research has also linked mentoring to higher pay for women and minorities. Management consultants at Boston-based consulting firm Bain & Co., meanwhile, have found that companies that nurtured their potential leaders averaged shareholder returns of more than 10 percent a year over a 10-year period. In contrast, the firms that in Bain's opinion placed little emphasis on cultivating leaders averaged returns of less than 1 percent a year.

Success is rare, but possible

There are some mentoring programs that, against all odds, do succeed. Take the one at Ernst & Young. The U.S. arm of the $14.5 billion tax and audit giant didn't get serious about mentoring until 1996, shortly after it realized it had a big problem: Its women weren't getting the guidance from partners that was crucial for women to become partners themselves someday. Women made up about half of each new recruiting class. But by 1996, only 5 percent of Ernst & Young's 2,760 partners were female, compared with 8 percent at several of the company's rivals.

Ernst & Young's then-chairman, Philip Laskawy, knew the company needed outside help. So he hired Deborah Holmes, a Harvard-educated former corporate lawyer who was a consultant at Catalyst. Laskawy was fond of saying that when he grew up in the Bronx, all the smartest kids in school were girls. So why were only 5 percent of his partners female?

Holmes took one look at the firm and knew why. For all of its bluster about being a gender-blind workplace, Ernst & Young was anything but. Upon her arrival in 1996, Holmes conducted focus groups of 15 to 20 women. She started by asking them to raise their hands if they knew what it took to make partner, and if they had the backing of current partners to achieve that goal. Typically, only one or two hands would go up. When Holmes asked the same question of men, almost every hand would shoot up. Holmes recalls one woman in particular who, in her entire 11 years at the firm, had never even met a female partner. "Why should I believe that I would become one?" she asked Holmes.

Holmes discovered that the few women who had made partner had all aggressively sought out mentoring from men. "They reached out and demanded it," she recalls. The less aggressive women simply didn't get mentored. But why didn't those female partners then reach out to younger females, Holmes wondered? Because such mentoring, even on an informal basis, was frowned upon at Ernst & Young. "At that point in the firm's evolution it was not yet safe for women to mentor other women," Holmes recalls. Women who attempted to do so would hear about it from their male counterparts-"Are you plotting to overthrow us?" they would say, only half-jokingly.

In 1997, soon after joining Ernst & Young full-time, Holmes launched a pilot mentoring program just for women who directly serve clients in either the tax or audit practices in the firm's Upper Midwest region. The program was rolled out nationwide the following year. She established two tracks: one program for women with more than five years' experience, and one for women with less.

The women with more than five years' experience-mostly managers, a few rungs below partner-get one-on-one mentoring with an Ernst & Young partner from their own department (audit or tax). Mentors aren't compelled or coerced to participate; they volunteer their time. When you force someone to be a mentor, says Holmes, you get a crummy mentor.

Nor does she make the mistake of assigning anyone's boss to be that person's mentor. When the boss is the mentor, mentees can't raise certain crucial subjects-like, say, how much they hate their boss. In most cases, each mentee gets to choose her mentor. And if they don't wind up clicking, she can request a different mentor through her department head or through HR.

The pair connects in person at least four times a year: Once to set goals, once for a six-month review, then for a year-end evaluation, and at another time of their choosing. At those meetings, any topic is fair game: career goals, problems with managers, skill development, work-life balance, performance. All chats are confidential. "There is nothing I would feel uncomfortable talking to him about, which I know makes him shiver," says Dallas-based senior manager Linda Henry, of her mentor, tax partner John Cullins.

In addition to their one-on-one sessions, the mentors introduce mentees to senior leaders way up the corporate ladder whom they would otherwise never have met. For example, Cullins once arranged for Henry (then a lowly manager) to lunch with a managing partner while he was in town. Mentees can even grade their mentors through the firm's 360-degree performance measurement system. The evaluations are serious business: Ernst & Young adjusted salary increases and denied promotions to some managers who didn't deliver as mentors, although Holmes points out that a manager's promotion or raise would never be determined solely by mentoring performance.

What about the women with less than five years' experience? Holmes worried that if she assigned each of them a one-on-one mentor, she'd spread the partners too thin. So she divided those women into "spheres" or "circles"-each composed of six to seven women and a three-person team of senior staffers, at least one of whom has to be a partner and at least one of whom has to be a woman. The "circles" meet quarterly. Holmes deliberately kept the ground rules to a minimum. "I don't want this to be seen as something invented by HR," she says.

At the same time, Holmes needed to make sure that the younger men didn't feel they were under attack. This is a common problem with mentoring programs that target a specific group such as women or African-Americans, or as Ernst & Young euphemistically calls it, "differential investing in people." One night, a young male staffer popped his head into the office of Jim Turley, who was head of the Midwest region at the time and is now chairman and CEO of Ernst & Young. "This isn't fair," the staffer said of the mentoring efforts. "What about me?"

Turley sympathized, but spun the question around. "You feel strongly enough about this to talk to the managing partner of the entire region," he said. "Think about your female colleagues-would any of them have stood in my office and spoken up in the same way?" The male staffer said he had never thought of it that way, and suddenly got the point.

Each mentor-mentee relationship usually lasts about three years (although it can last longer), at which point the mentee might need a new mentor higher up the food chain-and might be ready to acquire some mentees of her own. Partner Kelly Grier has received mentoring from senior partner Tom Maurer for 14 years-long enough for Grier to have her own cadre of mentees, male and female, many of whom Maurer has met.

"I admire Kelly for what she has accomplished and the fact that I know I can contact her with questions or concerns at any time," says senior manager Jessica Finley, one of Grier's mentees.

When the Midwest program got rolled out nationally, some tweaking was necessary. For example, the tax and audit folks, who each have their own lingo, preferred to meet separately instead of being lumped together. Some formal mentoring programs, such as the mentoring circles, were later wrapped into a larger corporate workplace initiative called "Career Focus." Soon after the pilot ended, Laskawy was so happy with Holmes' efforts that he hired her full-time and gave her an office just down the hall from his. Holmes has since moved to another role at Ernst & Young, leading the firm's corporate social responsibility activities.

Although women received much of the early attention, Ernst & Young has launched several other companywide programs meant to quickly transmit the smarts of senior staffers to junior ones. Eearning Partnerships, launched in 2002, is a year-long program that introduces minority employees to senior leadership and supports informal mentoring. The program now boasts 180 pairs.

Mentoring isn't just for younger staffers, though. The Executive Mentoring Program pairs high potential minority partners with members of Ernst & Young's Americas Executive Board like John Ferraro, who mentors a fast-rising AfricanAmerican senior partner named Sam Johnson. Ferraro knows the value of mentoring-in fact, he still keeps in touch with his own mentor, who's been retired for 20 years.

Over time, the firm also came to realize that its employees needed a deeper understanding of global business in order to handle big multinational clients. So the company now pairs promising managers with senior partners who manage global client accounts. In 2000, when Grier was transferred to Munich to take over a testy client in the throes of relocating its headquarters to Zurich, her mentor Maurer opened up his extensive Rolodex of European contacts. And although based in the U.S. at the time, he met her in London on the Fourth of July that year to catch up and trade notes over dinner and a few pints of Guinness. "You can teach debits and credits in a class, but when it comes to how to deal with a tough client, it takes having done it before," says Maurer. "Passing that knowledge on is beneficial, and if we don't, we are in a lot of trouble."

The demands of multinational clients raise a thorny issue for professional services firms like Ernst & Young. When time is literally money, how can senior partners find time for mentees? In Aligning the Stars (Harvard Business School Press, 2002), co-authors Tom Tierney and Jay Lorsch weigh the longterm benefits of mentoring against the potential short-term loss of revenue: "When a firm chooses to allocate its most valuable resources away from clients and to young stars, the economic consequences are real and visible." Jim Freer, an Ernst & Young veteran who now serves as "vice chair of people," acknowledges this: "There will always be a tension between the things we absolutely know we have to do for our people, and the clients we serve." That said, "we can always find time" for mentoring, says Maurer, whether it's before work, at lunch, over e-mail, or even a phone call on the weekend.

How much do these mentoring programs cost Ernst & Young? The revenue lost when partners spend time with mentees rather than billing it to clients is clearly substantial (the firm says it hasn't calculated the figure). But Freer claims that its increased retention of women, for example, is saving the firm $10 million annually-mainly from the cost of recruiting and training new staff. And since 1997, the percentage of women partners has risen from 5 percent to 13 percent. In 1995, according to a survey of accounting professors by industry newsletter Public Accounting Report, Ernst & Young was only the fourth most sought-after employer among the then-Big Six firms. By 2001, the firm had risen to No. 1.

Finally, Freer credits the firm's mentoring programs for helping re-establish the firm's credibility in the wake of scandals at Enron, WorldCom, and elsewhere that have rocked the accounting world. "We are in a position now to regain the public trust we have tarnished," says Freer. "We need mentoring relationships to tell newer people what it means to make the right decisions." Mentoring as a solution to corporate America's ethics problem? Well, it's a start.