Mentoring – Feedback and Follow-up to Fine-tune

Evaluation is usually something you do at the end of mentoring, right? Wrong! Not every mentoring relationship does well and you don’t want to wait to the end to find out. And, even the best mentoring can be fine-tuned. So follow-up:

• Individuals - early and often;
• The group - mid-way and at the end; use
• Formal, informal and fun ways of gathering feedback; and
• When you get feedback, give feedback.

When you do you have the chance to nip problems in the bud. You’ll be able to make adjustments where necessary and you’ll keep participants engaged. You’ll also collect important data for planning future programs and reporting results.

Individual Follow-up – Early and Often

Check in with people soon after the program launch to ensure that they have made contact and started mentoring. Stay in touch and build your own relationship with participants. Help them feel that they can contact you if they need support or encounter difficulties. If you establish rapport and trust they’ll find it easier to approach you and resolve problems sooner, rather than letting them escalate or allowing the mentoring to die.

Group Review – Mid-way and End

Get the group together, face-to-face, online or by video or teleconference. Mid-way you can workshop what’s working well and what could improve. Facilitated discussion allows people to talk about challenges. Others may be able to suggest solutions that have worked for them. People can share their successes too. I find that participants leave a mid-way workshop energized and enthused with a plan for how to get the best from the rest of their time together.

A final gathering allows mentors and mentorees to end the relationship well. It gives closure, although many people may decide to continue informally. It’s an opportunity for celebration of achievements and recognition of contributions. It’s a chance to gain information that will enable you to refine the program for even better outcomes next time.

Formal, Informal and Fun Ways to Gather Feedback

It’s easy to create online questionnaires and it makes collating and analyzing the data much simpler but be aware that response rates can be low. If you use online questionnaires use the KISS method – Keep It Short and Simple. Let people know “there are just three questions” or “it will take less than five minutes”. To increase response rates offer some kind of reward or benefit for completing it.

Don’t rely on questionnaires alone, though. Other methods are more powerful in getting people to reflect on and articulate their experience. Well-designed, structured one-to-one interviews or focus groups can reveal important information. Workshops that allow group and individual feedback elicit a lot of responses especially when you incorporate pictures or visual methods. I use CCS cards that people sort through to select pictures in response to a set of questions. Sometimes I get them to draw or put stickers on posters to indicate responses.

One of the best feedback sessions I have experienced was in the form of an art show. I’d been facilitating monthly workshops with a focus on career development and each time I’d have pictures and inspirational quotes decorating the walls. People would come early just to make sure they could read all the quotes or note them down. So, a few weeks before the final session, I asked mentorees to create a poster, picture or any form of art that represented how they felt about mentoring at the end of a program and to speak briefly about what it represented. On the day the walls were adorned with all sorts of colorful representations, paintings, collages, even a quilted and embroidered wall hanging and a bag of jubes! It was delightful to hear ach person’s heartfelt story. Part-way through, I noticed that the CEO had quietly slipped into the back of the room. When everyone had spoken he came forward. I still get goose bumps when I remember what he said as he paid tribute to the participants, concluding: “There’s a four letter word that you won’t often hear a senior person say but it’s what I feel in this room … the word is love.”

When You Get Feedback Give Feedback

Once you’ve collected all this information, share it with your respondents! You may or may not provide participants with the full report and the recommendations you develop but at least summarize participant feedback and send it to them. They will feel valued, know you did something with their input and are more likely to be favorable toward future mentoring programs.

Feedback, follow-up and fine-tune so that mentoring works!

Want more expert advice on evaluating mentoring?

Email me or phone 02 4342 2610 (in Australia)