Mentoring at Work - Employment Today

Originally published in Employment Today Magagazine

A good mentoring programme has many benefits, but you must get it right, say Wendy Baker and Aly McNicoll. They outline five keys to ensuring your programme works.

Mentoring programmes can benefit organisations by making the recruitment of talent easier, speeding up induction of new staff, improving retention, enhancing leadership, increasing effectiveness of training, reinforcing organisational values, and improving networks and communication.

When it comes to implementing an in-house mentoring programme, however, UK expert Bob Garvey warns, that "the logic is simple but the application may prove difficult". In our experience, you get just one shot at it, and UK research has shown one in three programmes last only two years.

A mentoring programme is an initiative to establish and support mentoring relationships that involves a structure, an agreement to mentor or be mentored, and a clear frame-work for meetings. Such a programme requires clarity of purpose and needs mechanisms for ensuring it offers high value for the time involved to all those who participate.

To ensure your programme succeeds, it is important to follow these five keys:

Key One: Identify what will happen differently as a result of a mentoring programme in your organisation. This clarity of purpose needs to be linked with other organisational objectives and key strategies. You also need to identify champions at senior management level who will support and commit to the initiative.

Key Two: Assess your needs, design the framework of your programme and then plan how to publicise it internally. Explain how the progamme will work, and how it fits with other organisational processes. Clear policies and guidelines are important in creating and sustaining the programme. A dedicated project co-ordinator is critical to the successful implemention and management of your programme.

Key Three: Recruiting and matching participants is made easier when the criteria for choosing are clearly established. Use the skills of external mentors as well as your own internal people. The matching process is not an exact science; however, there are software packages available to help. The New Zealand Mentoring Centre works with a variety of 'guided choice' processes-from the mentoring project team doing the selecting and matching to giving the mentee a limited number of choices. Whatever process is cho¬sen, it needs to be transparent.

Key Four: To ensure that mentoring is of a good quality, there needs to be sufficient training for both mentors and mentees. Research has shown the success of a pro¬gramme is directly correlated to the skill of the mentor. It is unwise to assume that managers know how to mentor. They need to be very clear about role expectations and boundaries, and should be given the opportunity to develop the skills specific to mentoring. Those being mentored need to know how to get the most out of the opportunity. Appropriate training will ensure the mentee is firmly in the driver's seat.

Key Five: Mentoring programmes need to be monitored, reviewed and evaluated beyond the roll-out to ensure longevity. This requires regular contact to ensure participants are benefiting and to allow for early recognition of problems. It is damaging to a programme if relationships fizzle out without definite closure. Acceptable measures to gauge the impact of mentoring programmes are being evaluated, but the evidence is largely anecdotal. In a recent NZMC survey of New Zealand organisations, respondents reported that mentoring is not embedded in our organisations as yet so it is too soon to know the impact for sure.

Anyone interested in introducing a mentoring programme to their organisation needs to make a point of ensuring the five keys are in place.