This article is authored by BOLD Member, Ron Sacchi, in preparation for the BOLD Workshop titled "Mentorship: GoldMine or Minefield" on Sept. 1st, 2011.
1) Business Case for Program unclear:
Organization is unclear on business benefits the program would bring or more importantly how they would measure its success—as though it were a business. Examples of business measurements:
- Decreased time to productivity for new employees (requires knowing a baseline for the current “time to productivity”)
- Positively correlating decreased attrition to the program (requires specific data which positively ties the two factors –attrition and mentoring—together)
- Application of mentor knowledge to mentee’s job (requires observation or behavioral analysis)
- Recession and environmental factors which may have contributed to Mentoring becoming a “solution” for development. Two consistently heard:
Decreased spending on developmental programs and/or HR Programs in general; mentoring on the surface appears to be a “cheap” way to develop people.
The “Employee Engagement Bandwagon” – because hiring in general has diminished, keeping high performers happy (beyond “pay for performance”) in their current job has been a concern.
2) Creating a Common Vision: Requires a Senior Level sponsor for a Mentoring Program. The Sponsor needs to be able to articulate the Business Case as well as set the “tone from the top”. This person should be respected by all senior leaders in order to influence decisions at that level.
Key capabilties for a Sponsor include;
a. Willingness and availability to visibly support the program as its Ambassador to senior management
b. Experience at mentoring or having been mentored.
c. A successful track record in developing people in their organization
3) Communication: No matter how large/small the program is, besides the Sponsor, the “mentoring community” should meet and publish communications regularly. Just having a website, is not enough. Just publishing a newsletter is not enough. The mentoring community should be hosting regularly scheduled meetings where people outside the program can be educated and ask questions.
Successful programs run regular checkins and reviews. Separately, success hinges on the Sponsor presenting to senior leaders on progress to goals and measurements of success. Testimonials can help, but nothing garners more support than a Mentoring Program Operations Review at least once every 6 months.
4) Assessing Barriers: Periodic check-ins with mentoring partner pairs provides a forum in which to gather data to drive mentoring accountability to the mentees, understand the program’s strengths, weaknesses and make course corrections. No matter how large/small the program, there are key factors which need review Mentor needs, Mentee needs and Process Support Requirements. Each have their own complex challenges. Allowing a time and a place for a forum to collect this data and a commit to act on the inputs is necessary.
5) Mentors: In order for a program to succeed, the selection of potential Mentors is critical. A program is ONLY as good as the pool of mentors and their commitment to the program. Some key ways to identify potential mentors, credibility, positively perceived performance (accomplishments and experience), ability to coach (good listener, objective support, etc), time availabiity for the program, proximity to mentee (or mitigating structures and supports for timezones if virtual), and linguistic/language capabilities are at the top of the list. When matching a mentoring pair, chemistry and compatability are also critical for the success of the relationship. Some successful programs insist on Mentees interviewing their potential Mentors to get a feel for the chemistry involved.
6) Mentees: No program should be undertaken without expressly making the Mentee responsible for driving the process, driving the agenda of meetings, and being held accountable for achieving their own development plans. Most dialogue driven by Mentees is driven by their personal/professional development agenda. Such topics might include: career development, soft skills development (negotiating, public speaking, conflict managemen etc), product or technological understanding, industry trends, current events, expanding professional contacts, project work and in some cases, reconciling life/work balance. The most critical element for Mentee success is a very specfic set of developmental goals.
7) Program Management: There are five major phases to be managed in a Mentoring program:
A. Finding a capable Sponsor, Funding and Program Design and Roadmap
B. Selecting a pool of capable and willing Mentors
C. Addressing “who gets to be a Mentee”
D. Facilitating the Partner Matching process (with OR without software)
E. Providing a roadmap of support meetings for the partner pairs in order to monitor and make adjustments to the program roadmap.
Most programs underestimate the amount of resource time required for any/all of these steps.
A variety of software solutions exist to facilitate the matching process, but the amount of resource time spent on customization of the software can be as much as ten times the anticipated work. This is not because the softward is inherently bad. Rather, companies/entities discover that they have not thought out and agreed on their program intent and goals, constraints of mentoring talent in the organization, mentee selection, or matching criteria, Thus, in the absence common agreements in these areas, time must be spent facilitating the conversations so that agreements can be made, and strategies and ground rules set.
Nearly all successful formal Mentoring programs include one or two sessions of eduction/training/rapport building. The success factors for these programs include content and conversations around:
- Confidentiality ground rules
- Understanding/Reiterating the Role of the Mentor, Mentee and Mentee’s Manager
- Faciliated personal disclosure by both partners,
- Elements of trust-building and personal disclosure
- Partner pair goal setting and ground rules for the relationship,
- A common understanding of how success for the mentee will be measured,
- A common understanding of what listening objectively means
- An understanding of what obstacles which may occur and what to do when they occur
Consistent feedback from partner pairs and sociological research suggests that the first partner pair session is the most important piece of the program. As such, the design of those first sessions is not insignificant in terms of time, planning and faciliatation. Program management time is ALWAYS underestimated in this area as well. Even when an “off the shelf” offer can be found, each company’s/entity’s customization will require resource time in order to make it work.
8. Summary: The above is meant to highlight many unseen realities of bringing a mentoring program to light. Typically, the concept of a Mentoring program sounds easy in the “abstract”. Success in a program should not only be measured against the business case but also based on the satisfaction of the partner pairs. If all of the above are in place in a program, the program will stand a better chance of sustainability over time.
To reiterate, programs consistently underestimate the time, resource and project management effort that it takes to create a mentoring program. Experience shows that starting small doesn’t necessarily decrease the amount of labor and time required.
If it is any consolation, once a cohort of partner pairs has been started, the resource time for program management falls dramatically. The final word of warning, successful and sustainable programs have at least one full time coordinator. This person is required in order to manage the timelines, communications, meetings, and sponsorship. Great program managers are the accountability point of contact for reporting back to the business and executives—which is not a small job in an of itself.
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