A vibrant mentoring culture requires a laser focus on and commitment to ongoing mentoring training. Mentoring training, when well executed, is a springboard to organizational mentoring excellence. Here’s what you can do to ensure success:
1. Offer multi-level mentoring training for new, somewhat experienced, and veteran mentees and mentors. The need for mentoring training is ongoing. Targeted training experiences have shown to be most effective.
2. Facilitate regular mentoring roundtables. Roundtables are learning and support sessions that promote active and timely sharing of best mentoring practices among a peer mentoring group (mentee or mentor). Participation in roundtables encourages benchmarking of progress relative to others in the group.
3. Conduct renewal training for experienced and veteran mentors. Renewal training eliminates stagnation in the mentor role by elevating mentoring skills.
4. Prepare mentors to transition to a role as mentee. Transitions are particularly rich teachable moments. It is somewhat challenging when experienced mentors find themselves sitting in the mentee seat and trying to figure out how to function in that role.
5. Develop your organization’s internal mentoring expertise. Train and empower a cadre of mentoring coaches to support mentors and mentees at all levels to become successful at mentoring. Make sure they receive state of the art education and training.
6. Include mentoring training as a key element in your leadership development program. Mentoring is a leadership competency. Every leader should know how to be a mentor, how to find a mentor, how to create good mentoring relationships and how to best support mentoring.
