If You Build It Will They Come?

In the Kevin Costner movie “Field Of Dreams”, Costner’s character, inspired by a supernatural message: “If you build it, he will come”, builds a baseball field on his farm. In the movie, famous but ghostly, ball players do turn up to play on this field in the middle of nowhere. I won’t be a spoiler if you haven’t seen the film, suffice to say it has a heart-warming ending.

It’s a nice idea, if you build it they will come. It works for Apple, who have changed the world and amazed us with sleek personal technology that never existed before. Social media has sprung up that caters to our desire to connect and share. But there are millions of products, businesses and development initiatives, that are well conceived and well designed yet fail. Your mentoring program, no matter how well intended, can flounder because if you build it they may not come!

Although most people agree that mentoring is a good idea, not everyone will be instantly committed to giving it priority over conflicting demands. You will need to get your mentoring message across through promotion.

The purpose of promotion is to:

• Communicate the strategic and personal value of mentoring to all stakeholders.
• Attract and engage participants.
• Keep managers informed and supportive.

Depending on your resources, promotion could include management briefings and staff information sessions, posters, brochures, information kits, an intranet page, online or audio-visual presentations to communicate the value of mentoring.

Once you have convinced senior decision-makers that mentoring adds value and have enthusiastic participants, your challenge is to maintain their commitment over the long-term. And, there’s a third group often forgotten, that you can’t afford to ignore. Middle managers and supervisors, who are not supportive, can derail mentoring. Non-participants who are disgruntled can be a problem too.  So your promotion of mentoring must not be confined to pre-launch. A steady stream of communication is needed throughout the program. Senior and mid-management need high-level messages reinforcing the strategic value. Supervisors of participants must be kept in the loop. Participants need regular contact and two-way information to feel supported. Non-participants need to know that their development is not being ignored.

You need to set up a communication schedule that delivers the right messages to the right people at the right time. It is wise to develop, and even automate, some aspects of your communication before launching your mentoring strategy. Promotion is critical to ensure mentoring works!