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.
1. Preparation
Preparation is key in developing and implementing successful mentoring programs and creating the mentoring culture to support them.
- Are your mentors and mentees ready to engage in a mentoring relationship?
- Are you providing training to get everyone up to speed and on the same page?
2. Priority
Sufficient time must be honored, dedicated and allocated to mentoring.
- Are your mentors and mentees meeting regularly, setting goals, and developing action strategies?
- Does the person coordinating mentoring have sufficient time and resources to be successful?
3. Position
Mentoring must be clearly understood as a strategy to address critical business issues for the organization.
- Is your business case clear?
- Are you communicating the rationale for your mentoring efforts frequently and consistently?
4. Pool
The quality of a mentoring pool directly impacts the success of a mentoring program.
- Have you created criteria for selecting mentors and mentees?
- Have you recruited the best possible mentor candidates?
5. Politics
Never underestimate the importance of politics.
- Are your top leaders on board?
- Have you identified and addressed potential obstacles and landmines that might derail your success?
6. Progress
Tracking progress and assessing the impact of mentoring on the organization’s strategic objectives reinforces the value of mentoring.
- Have you identified how you will measure the impact of mentoring?
- What are your mentoring partners doing to hold themselves and each other accountable for achieving results?
Are you minding your P’s and Q’s?
