Exploring professional mentorship programs within your alumni strategy can be a motivating factor in engaging highly-valued members of your program.
Many successful business executives attest to the vital role that mentorship has played in their career progress. This is validated by the fact that 92% of Fortune 500 companies have professional mentorship programs in place, including the likes of Boeing, Caterpillar, McGraw-Hill, Bain and Company, GE, as well as Intel.
While the immediate assumption is that the benefits weigh up in favor of employees who sign up as mentees for a program, there are also winning cards for the mentors involved in developing an organization’s unshaped talent.
The opportunity to mentor people is not only personally fulfilling, but it can also have substantial career benefits for the mentor. There’s considerable value to be gained in the knowledge, growth, and personal connections that alumni can take away from the relationship. For the qualified members in your program, it can be a value add to keep them engaged while the company reaps the rewards from participants of a successful mentorship relationship.
If you want a mentorship program to yield the desired results, ticking the following boxes will make all the difference:
The first and most important qualifier for success when it comes to a professional mentorship program is the recruitment of qualified candidates. This includes both mentors and mentees.
Mentors can come from the pool of current employees, alumni, as well as retirees. In all cases, individuals should be selected and evaluated according to merit. For instance, if a given mentorship interaction will hinge on leadership development, the mentor in question would have to be a senior leader with sufficient experience to impart to their mentee.
It’s also important to note that not every person in a leadership role would necessarily make a good mentor. Although they may be able to give insight into a particular job role or the inner workings of your organization, certain individuals simply don’t have a teaching mentality.
Ideal mentors are naturally enthusiastic, value learning, and are adept at getting people to step outside of their comfort zone. They listen actively, know how to provide feedback, and treat others with respect even though they are experts in their field.
A good mentee, on the other hand, is someone who is ready (and excited!) to receive instruction. They are ready to take action and ask questions, open to feedback, clear on their needs, committed, and respectful.
When you combine qualified candidates of this caliber, great results can follow.
To get the best possible results, your mentors and mentees have to be matched well. This calls for the use of clear matching criteria. Ideally, these criteria should also link with your business objectives in terms of the mentoring program.
For instance, if one of your key business goals is to train up a diverse management team, factors such as gender and ethnicity should be considered when tailoring mentor/mentee matches. Other frequently used criteria include job role and related skills, interpersonal skills, career level, and business function.
Once you have your proposed mentors and mentees sorted in terms of these criteria, it becomes far easier to make successful matches. This can be done in one of three ways, namely self-matching, administrative matching, or hybrid matching.
Self-matching refers to a process whereby mentors and mentees are allowed to select one another.
Administrative matching matches are made at the sole discretion of upper management.
Hybrid-matching is a process that combines these two approaches, e.g. by offering proposed matches approved by management who can then be selected or rejected by the mentors and mentees in question.
Whenever possible, give mentees a say in choosing their mentor. Mentees who are ready to take ownership of the process know what they want to get out of the relationship. They also tend to know their own quirks and preferences, which means they can select mentors with whom they can ultimately form a trusting, productive relationship.
Not all professional mentorship programs are successful. Some fail due to wrong matches, while others don’t cut the mustard because either the mentor or the mentee (or both) lacked sufficient training to fulfill their roles.
Another reason for failure is unrealistic expectations. As such, it is recommended that mentors and mentees take the time to plot out their expectations of the relationship ahead of time. This should include their viewpoints on confidentiality, planning, accountability, as well as timing.
Ideally, mentees should be clear about the skills they want to develop or issues they want to learn to manage. Both parties should also respect each other’s time and stick to a predetermined schedule in terms of meetings and attainable milestones.
Many companies find that there is a discrepancy between the number of people who are willing to mentor, and the number looking to be mentored, with the former being fewer. The simplest way to address this shortfall is to boost awareness of the program by proactively promoting it to employees and alumni alike.
Try hosting regular information sessions to raise the profile of the professional mentorship program, and enlist managers to identify potential mentors from within their team. Being recognized in this way should be seen as a tip of the hat and acclamation of their professionalism. This can be facilitated by amplifying positive word-of-mouth accounts from former program participants.
As an example, Boeing’s mentorship program works by recruiting engineers who are nearing retirement age to become pivotal members of the technical mentorship program. Their HR department also maintains an active community of employees and alumni who collaborate, share tips, and support one another.
The last few years have challenged us to reinvent work, HR, and ourselves. We may not have expected the disruption to be quite as far-reaching as it was, but now that it’s here, it’s time to adapt and thrive. Implementing professional mentorship programs as part of your alumni strategy can make all the difference to engage your employees, alumni, and retirees to steer growth.
