What can you do to ensure sustainability of mentoring in your organization?
1. Reposition Mentoring
Engagement in mentoring doesn’t begin and end with participation in a corporate mentoring program or retirement. And yet, current mentoring practice seems to do just that. It is long past time to reposition it and create a mentoring culture that supports all mentoring rather than compartmentalizing mentoring participation to specific populations or targeted programs (such as high potentials, emerging leaders, new hires).
2. Create a Mentoring Culture
According to New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, “When you have a mentor you are twice as likely to be engaged with work and thriving in overall well-being.” Who wouldn’t want those outcomes? We know beyond dispute mentoring promotes learning, growth and development. We never outgrow our need for it. So why not be more inclusive and bring everyone into the fold?
A mentoring program requires a mentoring culture to ensure sustainability. When mentoring lives in a mentoring culture, implementation and integration becomes a cultural norm and expectation. In addition, a mentoring culture brings strategic advantages. It creates a more connected and aligned workplace. It is better able to manage and grow organizational knowledge and develop its talent. Talent retention, employee engagement, company loyalty and productivity all increase. A mentoring culture supports diversity and promotes inclusion. It facilitates career transitions, and improves leadership skills. It maximizes time, effort and resources by enhancing the learning throughout the organization.
3. Embed It
Effective mentoring can exist without the support of an established mentoring culture, but inevitably, it requires more work, a longer ramp up time and persistence to maintain and ensure long term continuity. Maintaining mentoring momentum is just plain hard unless it becomes a cultural priority and closely aligns with an organization’s strategic objectives.
Embedding mentoring in the fabric of the organization assures that mentoring is vested in the many rather than the few. People outside the immediate implementation circle feel a sense of ownership and responsibility and hold others accountable. Cultural integration helps maintain the integrity of the mentoring process.
Creating a mentoring culture is a work in progress. This means you need to be minding your Ps and Qs: continuously monitoring, assessing and enhancing your efforts. If you keep these six Ps in mind – preparation, priority, position, pool, politics and progress – they should enhance your efforts and further help you embed good mentoring practice in your organization.
When we wrote Starting Strong, our primary goal was to help people understand what really good mentoring conversation looked like in practice. Second, we wanted to address some very basic (and commonly asked) questions: How do the individuals who are engaged in mentoring experience the relationship? What do they think about? What do they talk about? What conversations should they engage in to build their relationship and facilitate the learning process?
Starting Strong is a combination of two books in one – a mentoring fable and a conversation playbook. The fable presents an in-depth look at the dynamics and conversations inherent in a mentoring relationship when it is first starting out. The characters in the fable represent a composite of real life mentoring issues, struggles, and challenges. The conversation play book contains a set of tools to guide the reader’s mentoring conversations.
We had hoped that Starting Strong would provide a reference, a resource, and case study scenario. However, it wasn’t until recently that we discovered just how powerful it was as a training tool for raising the level of trust, deepening the relationship and keeping mentoring pairs on track.
Our Observations
Starting Strong enabled mentoring partners to build trust quickly because it created a shared language and understanding right from the start.
Starting Strong provided a roadmap for keeping relationships on track. As a result, new mentoring partners were more confident because they knew what to expect and they had the tools and strategies they needed to guide them.
Starting Strong gave experienced mentors new insights that allowed them to recognize what was missing in past mentoring relationships and better understand why they went off course.
Starting Strong provided a context for the training so that participants had a mental picture of what good mentoring looked like.
Starting Strong increased mentee understanding about the purpose of mentoring and their role in driving their own development.
Starting Strong gave mentees a better understanding about the role of their mentor in helping help them tackle their issues – without solving the problem for them.
How Reading Starting Strong Can Help
Each participant was sent a copy Starting Strong prior to the initial mentoring training and asked to think about specific questions prior to the initial training.
What resonated for you? What surprised you? What is something new you learned?
Mentors: What skills and competencies do you admire the most in the mentor, Cynthia?
Mentees: In what ways do you relate to the mentee, Rafa? What did you learn from his experience?
We found that reading Starting Strong made a significant difference in the quality and depth of the mentoring conversations that took place during and after the mentoring training.
Our observations were validated by the participant comments five weeks following the training:
Starting Strong was valuable in helping me know what I could expect.
Starting Strong challenges traditional views.
It gave me comfort to know there was a clear roadmap I could follow.
Starting Strong was an eye opener about what good mentoring really looked like.
It prepared us to start on the right foot and understand what we were getting into.
It guided us step by step through the conversations we needed to have.
It jump started our conversation.
Starting Strong focused us on addressing some things we might not have addressed.
The book opened the door to the different conversations we need to have.
Starting Strong offered an example of a mentor and mentee and seeing their perspective.
Action Step:
Ask participants to read Starting Strong prior to your next training event. It will kick start mentoring training and get mentoring pairs started on the right foot.
If you’ve answered yes, then you owe it to yourself to hone and deepen your mentoring skills. And, there is no better teacher than Cynthia Colson. But who is Cynthia Colson?
You’ll meet Cynthia and her mentee in our new book, Starting Strong. Cynthia is an experienced mentor who is committed to her own growth and development as a mentor and the growth and development her mentees.
The story of Cynthia and her Gen-Y mentee unfolds over 90 days (six mentoring meetings) and you get to sit in on each of them. You will hear their private thoughts before, during and after their meetings. At the end of each chapter, you will find questions to prompt personal reflection and spark conversation about the chapter content.
The conversation playbook guides you so that you can engage in parallel conversation with Cynthia and her mentee. It prepares you for your mentoring sessions by suggesting appropriate conversation topics, starters and probing questions to use to build a solid foundation for your own mentoring relationships during the first 90 days.
If you’re ready to move your mentoring practices from good to great, you won’t want to miss this opportunity to benchmark your mentoring skills against Cynthia Colson’s best practices.
Are you from Gen X or Y, anxious to advance your career?
Are you eager make a mark in your organization?
Are you committed to orchestrating your own future?
If you’ve answered “yes” to any of these questions, you will need good mentors if you’re going to be successful.
In our new book, Starting Strong: A Mentoring Fable, you have the opportunity to observe mentoring at work and learn valuable lessons from an experienced mentor about what makes a mentoring relationship successful.
Cynthia, a talented and successful VP of Marketing and Communications agrees to mentor Rafa, a Gen Y financial analyst. Cynthia enjoys mentoring talented, ambitious employees, but only when she is sure that her time investment will truly make a difference.
Rafa is new to mentoring and doesn’t know what to do or what to expect. In retrospect, he realizes that he had a lot to learn about mentoring. The truth of the matter is, most mentees, like Rafa, would like to come to mentoring better prepared.
In Starting Strong, you soon discover just how important the first 90 days are to laying the groundwork for a productive and successful mentoring relationship and what you can do to prepare yourself so that your mentoring relationship starts out and stays strong.
Here’s a sneak peek at some of the success strategies you will find in our book:
Get to know your mentor and help them get to know you.
Do you feel comfortable being honest and open about your strengths and weaknesses?
Establish agreements that define your relationship and clarify your expectations.
How often will you meet?
What is your understanding about confidentiality?
Who will set the agenda for your meetings?
Articulate the goals that will be the focus of your relationship.
Are they SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely) enough to produce tangible results?
Identify specific learning opportunities that will encourage you to stretch and grow.
Are you playing it safe, or are you being pushed out of your comfort zone?
Here’s another question we often get about mentoring. Again, we hope it helps you in your own mentoring adventures.
Note: These questions are compiled from several questions we receive, and do not necessarily reflect any one person’s submission.
Q: I’ve been tasked by my HR VP to start a mentoring program to prepare our managers for new roles with greater responsibilities. Our VPs and senior leaders are the mentors and I’m supposed to put together a training session for them. I have never developed a training program before and I have never trained senior leaders. I’m shaking in my boots. Help!
A: Help is on the way! Your leadership has identified an important business imperative behind mentoring efforts, which is a great first step. Mentoring is not just a “feel-good” activity. It should address the strategic business goals of the organization. You need to ensure that your efforts and investments pay off. It can be overwhelming to create a dynamic mentor training program that is engaging, participative and informative.
An organization that identifies mentoring as a strategic tool must develop its in-house capacity for mentoring training. To be a truly effective mentor trainer, you have to develop some expertise in mentoring. We have a solution for you. Our Mentoring Facilitator Trainer Certification Program will prepare you to deliver Mentoring: Strategies for Success in your organization. The content of that program will ensure your mentor leaders:
Understand the purpose and key concepts of mentoring and how it differs from coaching
Identify their learning style and the role of learning in facilitating mentee growth and development
Recognize the four predictable phases in the mentoring cycle and the key components of each phase
Structure the initial mentoring conversation to get started on the right foot
Explore how to set learning goals, set priorities and identify milestones
Recognize and overcome common stumbling blocks in a mentoring relationship
Support, challenge and provide effective feedback to mentees
Bring the relationship to successful closure
Our training certification process will allow you to master the content and gain experience delivering the material to your audience. You will walk away after three days with all the tools, competencies and confidence you need to be successful.
And you’re in luck. Our next training event is coming up, Monday, September 29 – Wednesday, October 1. Registration is open now, but it fills up fast, so register today!
People often ask us questions about mentoring or seek mentoring advice. We decided to answer a few of these questions on the blog this month. Hopefully their questions (and our answers) will shed some light on your own mentoring questions.
Note: These questions are compiled from several questions we receive, and do not necessarily reflect any one person’s submission.
Q: Six months ago, our mentoring program was announced. Everyone, and I mean everyone, was buzzing about it and our people were eager to get started. At first, there was a flurry of activity and everyone was meeting with their mentee and really pretty excited. But all that energy was short-lived. About six weeks in, our mentors started telling us they had run out of things to talk about. As it turns out, most of them were just having coffee and catching up. It seems like we’ve missed the boat somehow. What would you suggest?
A: What you are describing is the Three Cups of Coffee Syndrome. The mentor/mentee relationship has been established, but it lacks direction, focus or goals to move mentoring forward. This is what often happens when organizations launch a mentoring program without providing sufficient and consistent training for their mentors.
Good mentoring requires specific skill sets. Even leaders who engage in informal mentoring throughout their entire careers struggle with creating successful mentoring partnerships.
Mentoring training builds more confident and competent mentors. It promotes mentor readiness, creates a standard of mentoring practice, provides guidelines for ensuring mentoring success and offers a safe climate of support. Mentor training offers a roadmap and a benchmark for mentors to measure their success as well as strategies to address stumbling blocks quickly.
Good mentoring training saves time. It keeps mentoring interesting, productive and on track from the get-go.
If you’re interested in mentoring training, register for our 3-day training certification program. The Mentoring: Strategies for Success program will teach you how to lead your own one-day training for your organization. Our next program is Monday, September 29 – Wednesday, October 1. Seats are limited, so register today!
