Mentoring Strategy - Will Your Program Produce?

Despite current talk of job losses, there is strong competition for certain specialist and high potential employees. It’s costly to recruit and even more expensive to lose them. Mentoring is rightly identified as a winning strategy. If you want to attract and retain talented employees and meet their aspirations for career development opportunities, then mentoring will be part of your offering. But how do you ensure that mentoring produces?

With resources tight in the current environment, it is tempting to use a set and forget approach to mentoring. You introduce the concept, match people and leave them to it. That’s fine if you just have to tick the box to say: “we have mentoring”. What is the estimated success of this approach? About 20%. The reason? 80% of people will either:

be so busy that they’ll struggle to make time and other priorities will take precedence;
lack the skills and understanding for the role; and/or
not fully commit to the process and therefore gain little value. That means that maybe eight out of ten people will be disappointed or dissatisfied, not just with mentoring but with the empty promise of development offered by their employer.

Let’s get serious. If you want mentoring to produce strategic outcomes – that is, to add real value to the organisation and deliver tangible benefits to your people, you need to make mentoring more than a buzz-word, get clear about its strategic intent and take a structured approach. That means you’ll need to invest in planning.

More Than a Buzz-word

The word mentoring is thrown around easily enough, but it’s harder to define and people have very different ideas about what it means. You will need to transform a nebulous concept into a concrete and explicit description, applicable in your situation. You need to define the relationship, the roles of mentors and mentorees and how to have productive conversations. You won’t be able to do that unless you have clarified the purpose of mentoring from the point of view of the organisation and the people you want involved.

Clear Strategic Intent
Mentoring must produce worthwhile outcomes, otherwise why bother? You need to get clear about what outcomes matter to your organisation and where mentoring will make a difference. What strategic issues can mentoring influence? Which employees should be targeted? What do they need? What do you want mentoring to produce?

Here are just a few examples of outcomes that mentoring programs I’ve been involved with recently, have delivered:

• Improved client service;
• Increased transition to management of Aboriginal staff;
• Safer workplaces – policies and procedures developed and implemented;
• Added viability of small businesses - opportunities, profitability and effectiveness nurtured;
• Transfer of classroom learning to the workplace;
• Operational consistency of technical functions;
• More women in the leadership talent pipeline;
• Greater cross-functional communication – breaking down silos;
• Employee engagement - staff staying positive, productive and feeling valued during tough times;
• Tangible support for young people in the workplace;
• Intergenerational relationships and communication improved;
• Leadership skills enhanced;
• Individual career goals and plans documented;
• Support networks established for people in non-traditional, regional and remote locations. 

Clarifying what’s needed and why mentoring is important helps stakeholders get on board and provide the commitment and support necessary to make mentoring work.

A Structured Approach

Deciding on a strategy is one thing, putting it in place is another. Workplace mentoring needs a structure: people, policies, procedures, technology and resources to support it. Just some of the questions you’ll need to answer are:

• Who will lead and manage the program?
• How will momentum be maintained?
• How will senior management commitment be gained and made visible?
• What communication methods will keep everyone in the loop?
• How will you recruit, match, train and support participants?
• What will you do about people who don’t participate?
• How will you monitor progress?
• When, how and what will you evaluate? 

Invest in Planning
All of this means that you need to have a plan. The best programs start with a group of people, passionate about producing outcomes from mentoring. HR people are usually keen and switched on but you need a broader base of input and commitment. You need support from the top, of course but you also need champions, advocates and allies amongst the line managers and thought leaders of the organization. You are also best to involve some potential mentors and mentorees in the planning. Pull together a steering committee as a project team that represents the interests of all concerned. It may take time and effort to work from high-level planning down to the nitty-gritty details but the investment will be worthwhile because that’s how mentoring works.

Agree/disagree or share your thoughts here!