Secret One of Award Winning Mentoring - Planning

Four key elements must be addressed if your mentoring program is to be successful:

1. Planning– producing a blueprint that clearly ties the strategy to important outcomes and maps out how they will be achieved and measured;
2. Promotion- your ability to communicate so that the value of mentoring is recognized and welcomed by stakeholders;
3. Preparing– training and equipping participants to succeed in mentoring; and,
4. Program Support - a structured program that includes ongoing assistance, follow-up and feedback.

A Planning Process

The first secret of the award-winning program is planning. My work with the NSW Department of Community and Family Services’ Aboriginal Management Mentoring Program began with facilitating a mentoring strategy planning process. They had researched the need for mentoring and a one-day planning workshop laid the foundation for success.

Mentoring strategy planning should engage stakeholders and result in informed decisions about how to implement mentoring to produce the outcomes you want.

Strategic planning means thinking about where you are now, where you want to be, how you might get there and what’s in the way. Workplace mentoring addresses these questions at two levels, organizational and individual.

From an organizational perspective, you need to consider strategic objectives that might be achieved through mentoring. Then think about where mentoring could provide the most leverage to contribute to those objectives. Exploring these questions allows you to determine the aims of your mentoring program.

When the strategic value of mentoring is clear, you can identify the people whose professional development will result in both personal benefits to them and strategic outcomes for the organization.

Engaging Stakeholders

A consultative planning process needs to include all the people who will directly or indirectly impact on the success of your program.

The people who are to be mentored are your first group of stakeholders. You must find out (not assume) what their needs are so that you can design mentoring that will make a difference. Gathering input from potential mentorees  allows you to determine who will be in your next group of stakeholders - the mentors.

Having identified potential mentoring participants, you need to engage other stakeholders. Obviously, senior decision-makers need to be on board at a strategic level. You will also need a person and/or team responsible for mentoring at the operational level.

It is easy to overlook a group that, if excluded at any stage, may derail workplace mentoring – the managers of the participants. Mentoring produces a return on the investment of time and people but the managers of the participants have to deal with the immediate cost of their people being off the job. They may be more concerned about the short-term use of resources than the longer-term strategic gain.  So they are important stakeholders to engage. Include them in the planning.

Informed Decisions

There is no “one-size-fits-all” in mentoring. There are many variables and many choices to be made. A consultative process that explores all the issues will deliver the best results.

Expert input about mentoring programs, plus the stakeholder’s knowledge and experience enables informed decisions to be made about how to implement mentoring.

Gather input from all stakeholders then facilitate a workshop with a representative sample of stakeholders to map out the mentoring strategy. The outputs can then be used to produce your plan.  Document the blueprint that shows how mentoring links to organizational strategy, the outcomes expected and how they will be measured and the activities and resources to be used to achieve them.

This article has given a very brief overview of planning. Over the next few weeks, my newsletters will outline promotion, preparation and program support. In the meantime, the resources I’ve listed below will be of assistance if you are planning a mentoring program. I am happy to speak with you about your program, just call +61 2 4342 2610 or email ann@mentoring-works.com to set up at time.

Resources

Webinar and Flashbook Combo 

For the tiny price of $20.00 you receive a flashbook – a concise written version of the topic covered in the webinar plus the webinar recording itself. Topics include:

• Recruiting Mentors
• How To Get The Mentoring Message Across
• Evaluating Mentoring

Details here.

DIY Manual

How To Design and Run Your Own Mentoring Program
@ A$75 plus postage or A$55.00 e-book
Preview and purchase here.

Packages

The Designers Essentials@ A$160.00 plus postage or A$145.00 e-book
The Works@ A$215.00 plus postage or A$195.00 e-book

Details here.

Workshop

Plan Your Mentoring Strategy
Facilitated by Ann Rolfe
Contact me for details. Call +61 2 4342 2610 or email ann@mentoring-works.com to set up at time.