How to Start a High-Impact Mentoring Program

Do you want to start a mentoring program? Brilliant. Mentoring is a proven approach to drive rich learning and development for both mentees and mentors. Mentoring also benefits the sponsoring organization.

For employers, mentor retention, promotion rates and employee satisfaction increase. At universities, student mentoring has been shown to improve student retention, increase job placement rates, and increase alumni engagement by selecting alumni as mentors.

An impactful and motivating mentoring program is within your reach. But great mentoring programs don’t just happen. They are built through careful planning and a sustained commitment to guide participants through the mentoring process while continually improving the program.

Sounds like a lot of work? It can be, but the right tools will make the endeavor much easier. Mentoring software provides a complete program environment that helps organizations start, manage, and measure all types of mentoring programs.

There are 5 key steps to follow when designing and implementing your program:

1. Design your mentoring program.

Successful tutoring programs offer both structure and flexibility. The structure provides the participants with a mentoring workflow to follow and is critical in helping the participants achieve productive learning that achieves the defined objectives. Similarly, flexibility is essential to support different individual tutoring needs through specific goals, preferences, and learning styles.

Key design decisions include:

• Enrollment: is it open, by application or by invitation only?

• Tutoring style: can be traditional, flash, reverse

• Connection type: possibly 1:1, group or project

• Connection duration: typically weeks or months, or perhaps even a single session

• Community/social aspects beyond formal mentoring, monitoring and reporting needs.

2. Attract attendees

The best-designed mentoring programs won’t get far without effective program promotion, mentor recruitment, and training.

You will need to convince them that participating is worth their time and effort. Beyond the participants, key leaders and stakeholders will need to be educated on the benefits of the program and strategic value to the organization. Here’s a quick checklist:

• Promote benefits to participants and stakeholders.

• Consider recognition and rewards for participants.

• Provide training and reinforcement throughout the program.

3. Connect mentors and mentees

A productive mentoring relationship depends on a good match. Matching starts by deciding what type of match you will offer in your program: auto match or admin match. Consider giving mentees a voice in the matching process by allowing them to select a particular mentor or submit their top three choices. Automatching is light administrative, which in larger programs can be a great advantage.

For more structured programs, such as large groups of new students at universities or groups of new corporate employees, you may want to start the program in bulk or admin matchmaking.

Matching best practices start with a strong profile for all participants (mentors and mentees). Critical profile elements include development goals, specific subject interests, location, experiences, and matching preferences.

The more you know about your participants, the better chance they have of a great fit and a happy and productive mentoring outcome.

4. Guide mentoring relationships

Now that your participants are enrolled, trained, and matched, the real action begins.

It’s also where tutoring can get stuck. Left to themselves, many mentorships will take off and thrive. But some may not. Because? Because tutoring is not usually part of the daily routine. Without direction and a plan, the mentoring relationship is vulnerable to losing focus and momentum. This is why providing some structure and guidance throughout the mentoring is vital to a successful mentoring program.

To guide the participants:

• Provide goals and action plans (or checklists or task lists) for the course of mentoring

• Providing “help” resources: best practice in tutoring

• Have a formal process that closes the mentoring experience, with the opportunity to receive feedback from the participants.

5. Measure your mentoring program

Mentoring is a significant investment when considering program management, infrastructure, and the valuable time of the participants. Articulating the impact is essential to ensure continued funding and support. In addition, the measurement phase also focuses on assessing the health of the program to identify pain points and opportunities.

Mentoring programs need to be tracked, measured, and evaluated on three heights: the program, the mentoring connection, and the individual. To be effective, you need the ability to capture metrics and feedback throughout the program’s lifecycle.

A word about the tools

Consider your toolkit when implementing a mentoring program. If you have more than 100 participants, you may want to consider tutoring software to help run your program. The tutoring software includes smart matching capabilities and guided tutoring workflows in an online portal so you can measure and share the results of the program. If your participant number is less than 50, spreadsheets will work fine to manage your program.

final thoughts

As a development strategy, mentoring is one of the most effective methods of lasting learning. Running an effective mentoring program goes way beyond just matching people up. Making a real impact in your organization requires effort, resources, and knowledge. Follow these 5 steps, and you’ll be on your way to implementing a mentoring program that’s easy, efficient, and measurable. Good luck!