CHAPTER 38
Implement a Mentoring Program That Works
Learning from others remains a prime way for people to gain knowledge and insights. It’s in our nature to want to talk to one another, examine how someone else accomplished a task or goal, and try to put those revelations to work for ourselves as we seek to improve our own skills or expand our own career opportunities. And therein lies the power of mentoring.
IN THIS CHAPTER:
Identify three important success factors for mentoring programs
Leverage organizational initiatives to identify program purpose
Determine the best population to participate as mentees and mentors
Describe metrics that can be used to evaluate mentoring program success
Mentoring relationships are about creating human connections where we can share with one another, learn from one another, and develop in ways that we could not do alone. Providing this type of personal and professional development experience to our employees is a critical factor in creating talented, engaged, and productive workforces.
Most talent development practitioners focus on the structural aspects of mentoring programs, such as matching processes or whether relationships are one-to-one or in groups. However, three often overlooked factors have a large impact on the sustainability and scalability of your mentoring program. To implement a mentoring program that works for your organization, be sure to:
• Define the purpose of the mentoring program.
• Recruit mentee and mentor participants.
• Identify the metrics for success
Purpose: What Is Driving Mentoring at Your Organization?
The first step to take is to determine why you are starting a mentoring program to begin with. Is it something your executive team has told you to do? And if so, do you know why? Did you conduct an employee survey to see what people want from your company and found out they wanted mentoring? Is there a development initiative that would benefit from mentoring to support its goals?
Defining the purpose of mentoring at your organization gives you a focal point against which you can design, launch, and measure your mentoring program.
From increasing employee engagement and addressing diversity and inclusion to improving employee turnover rates and building a pipeline of leaders, the purpose of your mentoring program (and the outcomes you hope to achieve as a result) will take shape based on the unique needs of your company.
To help clarify the purpose of mentoring at your organization, consider the following questions:
• What leaders, departments, or functions are requesting mentoring programs? If requests are from specific departments, consider using skills-coaching programs.
• Does your organization experience high employee turnover between six and 12 months of tenure? If so, consider implementing an onboarding mentoring program.
• Does your organization have enough skilled leaders to fill upcoming leadership positions successfully? If not, consider incorporating high-potential mentoring programs or succession planning programs.
• Does your organization need to provide support and development for underrepresented groups? If so, consider starting DEI mentoring programs, such as women’s networks, BIPOC resource groups, or veterans’ mentoring programs.
Need some ideas to help get your creative juices flowing? ATD’s 2017 research report Mentoring Matters: Developing Talent With Formal Mentoring Programs found that the top five reasons a company has a mentoring program are to:
• Develop current and future leaders (59 percent)
• Professional development (49 percent)
• New employee onboarding (35 percent)
• Knowledge management and knowledge transfer (23 percent)
• Organization development (14 percent)
Once you have a clear purpose in mind for your mentoring program, it is time to identify your mentoring program participants.
Participants: Who Will Engage With Your Mentoring Program?
Identifying your participants is a critical factor for designing a mentoring program. Define the pool too narrowly, and you may overlook potential mentees and mentors who could benefit from the program. Define it too broadly, and you run the risk of diluting the program’s purpose and confusing people as to the overall reason you implemented mentoring in the first place.
The good news is that identifying your participants should flow easily from the work you already did when defining the purpose of the mentoring program. For example, if the reason you want to have a mentoring program is to help retain and engage new hires, then you know that your mentees will be new hires. If you are designing a program to improve skills in the sales function, then your mentees will be anyone in a sales-related role.
From there, you can identify the cohort you think will be best suited for mentoring. Some mentoring programs have clear mentor cohorts—senior executives for succession planning, for example. Typically, mentors are asked to meet certain eligibility guidelines designed to ensure credible and experienced learning relationships. A common example is requiring several years of tenure at the company before mentors can participate in a high-potential mentoring program. On the other hand, you should avoid implementing too many eligibility requirements and ultimately restricting the potential mentor pool beyond usability. For example, requiring years of tenure at the company likely won’t be relevant for a DEI-type program. Be sure that any eligibility guidelines, such as tenure or job level, are important for the mentoring relationships to succeed.
Use these questions as a starting point for identifying mentees and mentors in your program:
• What audience are you trying to influence—such as high-potentials, new managers, women in leadership?
• Are there others who could take part as mentees, but fall outside the scope of that initial audience?
• Who is in the best position to help as mentors?
• Is it possible for an employee to qualify as a mentee in the program, while also being a mentor to someone else?
• Will mentees be required to participate (for programs such as onboarding), will specific employees be invited to participate (for select programs such as high potential), or will the program be available for any qualifying employees?
• Will mentors be invited to participate or nominated by others, or will the program be available to anyone interested in that role?
• How will you market and recruit new mentees and mentors into the program?
• Will participant roles remain static or can roles change as the program progresses. For example, can mentees become mentors?
To help get you started, Table 38-1 lists some sample mentee and mentor programs based on program purpose.
Table 38-1. Examples of Mentor and Mentee Programs
Program Purpose | Mentees | Mentors |
Onboarding | New employees; matched first week | Employees with 1 to 3 years’ tenure |
High-potential development | Emerging and rising leaders | Department and function leaders |
Succession planning | Next-gen executives | Current executives |
New manager development | Employees new to management | Employees with 3 to 5 years’ experience managing others |
Women in leadership | Members of the women’s employee resource group | Senior leaders (any gender) |
Black or BIPOC employee network | Members of the Black or BIPOC employee resource group | Senior leaders who have shared identity; allies |
Sales enablement | Employees aspiring to or currently in a sales enablement role | Successful employees in sales enablement roles |
Cross-functional development | Open to all employees across the organization | Any employees; recommend 2+ years’ tenure |
Breaking down silos | Employees from across different departments | Cross-functional leaders |
Recruiting Mentees and Mentors
While some employees will eagerly join the mentoring program, you may need to spend some time and effort recruiting mentees and mentors. Messaging can play a key role here. Craft your message in such a way that it speaks to each specific audience. Think about the questions potential mentees and mentors might need answered before they commit to the mentoring program.
For example, you may need to let mentees and mentors know the benefits of mentoring and what’s in it for them. According to ATD’s Mentoring Matters, the most frequently reported benefits for mentees participating in a mentoring relationship are:
• Professional development (36 percent)
• Better understanding of organizational culture (30 percent)
• Develop new or different perspectives or awareness of other perspectives (27 percent)
• Personal development (24 percent)
• Increased network (23 percent)
Beyond the top reported benefits seen in the study, mentoring programs have also proven effective in helping mentees:
• Improve self-awareness and career development skills.
• Explore potential in development areas yet untapped.
• Increase company, market, or business knowledge.
• Expand their leadership abilities.
• Increase their technical skills.
• Enhance opportunities for career advancement.
While the benefits to mentees might be intuitive and easy to identify, most practitioners miss the opportunity to identify the benefits mentorships bring to mentors. Clearly linking mentoring program participation with career benefits is a great tool for recruiting mentors—particularly if you expect to have fewer mentors than mentees. The Mentoring Matters report listed these top benefits for mentors:
• Develop new or different perspectives or awareness of other perspectives (59 percent)
• Develop leadership skills (49 percent)
• Gain insight into the organization or broader organizational perspective (38 percent)
• Increase professional development (31 percent)
• Increase communication skills (26 percent)
Additionally, many mentors reported the following value received from participating in mentoring programs:
• Share their expertise with another in the company.
• Prove themselves as valuable leaders.
• Expand their professional network.
• Invest in the future of the company.
• Enhance experience in their areas of expertise.
• Cement their role as subject matter experts.
Once your message is prepared, determine how to share it. Participation in mentoring programs increases significantly when individuals receive personal invitations or are nominated. One highly effective way to reach mentors is a cascading recruitment model. In this approach, mentors are invited into the program by someone in a senior leadership role, which adds credibility and a personal touch.
Having a person in a senior leadership role take an active part in the recruitment strategy adds a layer of tacit permission to spend time mentoring and shows that the leadership team is supportive of the program. In addition, most people feel more favorable about a program or product when someone they know and trust recommends it. Having that personal invitation as part of the recruitment strategy can help increase sign-up numbers.
A cascading recruitment process to sign up mentors could look like this:
• Senior leaders sign up to be mentors in the program.
• Those leaders then identify additional potential mentors within the one or two job levels immediately below their own.
• The leaders personally invite the identified mentors to participate in the program.
Engaging in a recruitment strategy like this can help build a grassroots advocacy effort that organically grows and thrives.
The cascading recruitment process can be repeated at various employee levels and adjusted for different audiences as your needs dictate. For example:
• Middle managers. Ask middle managers who are mentors to identify peers who would be good mentors. Then have the active mentors invite their identified peers to join the mentoring program.
• Emerging leaders. Ask emerging leaders who are mentors to identify potential mentors who are directly above or below them in your organizational hierarchy. Then ask those active mentors to invite the people they have identified to join the program.
Cascading recruitment strategies can also be used to increase your mentee pool:
• Senior leaders. Have senior leaders invite up-and-coming employees to be mentees in the program.
• Peers. Ask individuals at all levels of the organization who are already active members of the mentoring program to identify and invite peers they think would find value in the program.
• Immediate supervisors and managers. Ask supervisors and managers to identify any of their direct reports who would benefit from mentoring, and then have those leaders invite the employees to take part.
Mentoring is a personal learning and development process, so it should not come as a surprise that a personal invitation approach to join the program works well. By showing that you have given some thought to them as future mentees and mentors, you can build goodwill with a growing audience who may later become advocates and recruiters for you in years to come.
Getting Executive Sponsorship and Buy-In
In addition to identifying and recruiting mentees and mentors for your program, another critical aspect of your program’s success is identifying those who can act as sponsors and champions for your mentoring program. These are the people who can help secure funding for your program, give your mentoring program credibility and staying power within the organization, and help socialize it to other areas of the business and within the executive ranks. Gaining executive sponsorship and buy-in means that your program receives the funding and support it needs from leadership in the short term and is scalable and sustainable in the longer term.
To get buy-in from executive sponsors, an important first step is making the business case for mentoring. Many executives understand the power of working with a mentor as an individual, but may need to be convinced about the impact of launching a structured mentoring program for the company. In Mentoring Matters, ATD’s researchers found that the top benefits organizations received from mentoring programs were:
• Higher employee engagement and retention (reported by 50 percent of companies)
• Supporting growth of high-potential employees (reported by 46 percent of companies)
• Stimulating creation of intra-organizational relationships and collaboration (reported by 37 percent of companies)
• Knowledge management and transfer (reported by 37 percent of companies)
Sharing information with executives shows how mentoring affects the organization and business objectives. When trying to gain buy-in from executives and leadership, remember to:
• Inform them of the latest research indicating the impact of mentoring on the area most valued by the organization.
• Present a short vision statement for your mentoring program that is compelling and integrated into the core business practices of the enterprise.
• Ask for their feedback and input on your preliminary thinking, as well as for further discussions to explore the business impact of mentoring in more depth.
• Engage them around their experiences and views of mentoring; you may find that you have an ally already or that they already have assumptions about mentoring.
• Provide preliminary ROI information or other business drivers you are aware of that demonstrate how mentoring is a win for them and the organization.
• Get their input on your business case: Where it is strong, where do they think it needs work, what business drivers are you missing?
• Help them recall their own personal examples of positive developmental relationships that may or may not have been identified as mentoring partnerships.
Once you have secured executive buy-in, get creative about how to leverage their support. Participants in mentoring programs appreciate knowing that senior leaders both endorse and are participating in mentoring relationships. Brief testimonials or comments from leaders add credibility to the program and give permission for people to invest time in mentoring.
Metrics: What Results Do You Need to See?
As with any employee development initiative, your mentoring program needs to track results. The data and metrics you track should be tied to the purpose of your program and the goals and objectives you set for it in the beginning.
For example, a high-potential development mentoring program may have a goal tied to it that seeks to increase the number of diverse, skilled, promotion-ready leaders for key positions by 15 percent. Therefore, you would need to track the participants in the program and their career progression to measure if your mentees are achieving the promotion rates you’ve set.
In an onboarding mentoring program, success metrics are more likely to involve reducing new-hire turnover. Therefore, evaluating the retention rates of new employees between the three-month and 12-month timeframe is a relevant and measurable goal for your mentoring program. In that case, measuring success would include identifying the retention rate for new hires prior to the launch of the mentoring program, as well as tracking mentees and evaluating how many stay with your company over a set period of time. Comparing these metrics will illustrate a clear picture of the mentoring program’s strategic impact.
Understanding the overall strategic metrics that indicate success for your mentoring program is important—however, using a single point of data presents a risk. Referring to our onboarding retention metrics example above, consider this possible scenario:
The company onboarding mentoring program has been making a significant impact on retention since its launch two years ago. Retention for new employees with less than 12 months of tenure has skyrocketed and almost reached the stated retention goal. However, halfway through year three, those retention numbers start to plummet. Without any other data to refer to, the program sponsor decides the mentoring program is no longer working and dismantles it. Unfortunately, the sponsor missed a key change to the hiring process that influenced the retention numbers from outside the mentoring program.
So, how do you avoid the single data point risk? Make sure to consistently review data from multiple points to tell a success narrative. Track and report data about participation in the program, goals set and accomplished, and participant comments on their relationships.
In the onboarding example, the program might have been saved if program participants were given frequent pulse surveys to assess obstacles, expectations, challenges, and progress. This would have identified the hiring process change so it could be reported as a challenge. And, whether the change was addressed or not, the sponsor would have factored in its impact when deciding whether to suspend the mentoring program.
With all of that in mind, consider tracking the following metrics for your mentoring program:
• Number of applicants to the program
• Number of mentees and mentors accepted
• Number of relationships matched
• Goals set, progress made, goals accomplished
• Participant satisfaction rates
• Employee retention rates
• Employee promotion rates
• Participants recommending the program to peers
Final Thoughts
The most successful mentoring programs have intentionally defined a strategic purpose, engaged mentees and mentors to participate in the program, and identified metrics to track the success of the program. Each of these three factors can have a tremendous influence on the ultimate results of mentoring in your organization.
Clearly defining a purpose is an essential, but often overlooked, step of designing a mentoring program that works. Whether the drivers for your organization are to retain talent, improve engagement, increase skill and productivity, or build support and communities, a clear mentoring program purpose is key to success.
Of course, most talent development practitioners know they need to recruit mentees and mentors into their mentoring programs. However, it is important to be clear about who is eligible to participate in different roles, as well as how they will be recruited. Another key to success is finding leaders across the organization who will sponsor and champion the mentoring program, which adds credibility and momentum.
As with any employee development initiative, your mentoring program needs to track results. The data and metrics you track should be concretely tied to the purpose of your program and the goals and objectives you set for the program in the beginning. Mentoring programs also benefit from measuring these factors at different points in time, and from different perspectives, to build a comprehensive narrative of success.
Building an effective, sustainable, and scalable mentoring program takes more than just a good matching process. Design a mentoring program that works for your organization. You will find a template for the three-step process to guide you through the design of your mentoring program on the handbook website at ATDHandbook3.org. The ultimate success of mentoring programs that work is built from being intentional and clear with program purpose, participants, and metrics.
About the Authors
Jenn Labin, chief diversity officer at MentorcliQ, has more than 15 years of experience in talent development, training, and design. She helps clients to launch world-class mentoring programs for career development, skills coaching, and diversity, equity, and inclusion enabled by MentorcliQ’s award-winning mentoring software. Jenn is the author of Mentoring Programs That Work, which describes a unique approach to building scalable and sustainable mentoring programs. Jenn’s work has been featured in previous editions of the ATD Handbook, TD, Chief Learning Officer, and HR.com. She is a regular presenter at the ATD International Conference, ATD chapters, and MentorCom.
Laura Francis is the chief knowledge officer for MentorcliQ. She has more than 20 years of experience focused on mentoring, writing, thought leadership, and strategic innovation. The proud mom of a child with disabilities, she enjoys writing about the connections she sees in her personal and professional life. Her articles can be found on the ATD website, TD, Training Journal, Chief Learning Officer, Training Industry, and on MentorcliQ’s website.
References
ATD (Association for Talent Development). 2017. Mentoring Matters: Developing Talent With Formal Mentoring Programs. Alexandria, VA: ATD Press.
Recommended Resources
Emelo, R. 2015. Modern Mentoring. Alexandria, VA: ATD Press.
Francis, L. 2019. “3 Reasons Why Mentoring Programs Fail.” ATD blog, November 15. td.org/insights/3-reasons-why-mentoring-programs-fail-and-what-you-can-do-about-it.
Labin, J. 2017. Mentoring Programs That Work. Alexandria, VA: ATD Press.
Moss, S. 2016. “All About Mentoring.” TD, October 5. td.org/magazines/td-magazine/all-about-mentoring.