Why a facilitated mentoring program?

Mentoring is one of the best employee development tools organizations have available.

A mentor can adapt mentoring to the individual protégé to tailor developmental conversations. A mentor also builds a relationship with a protégé that can promote loyalty and impart culture. However, many employees who want a mentor do not always feel like they have access to one or know what to do when they get one. Organizations that establish facilitated mentoring programs can help employees connect with mentors who are best suited to the employee’s developmental goals and give structure and guidance to mentors and protégés to get the most out of the experience. A facilitated program provides numerous benefits when done well:

Accelerate Employee Development

Employee development often takes the form of on the job training, learning lessons along the way. When employees do participate in development programs, they often struggle to integrate their new lessons back into their jobs. A mentor can create time and space to reflect and apply learning to speed up the development process.

Retain Talent

Employees who have a mentor within their organization are more likely to stay with their employer and are less susceptible to outside recruiting. By pairing an employee with a mentor who can develop a genuine relationship, the organization can create meaningful connections that are difficult to replace.

Strengthen Culture

Mentors can serve as cultural ambassadors, sharing the organization’s values and strengthening the connection to the company’s culture. By choosing mentors wisely, organizations can send a powerful signal to employees in regard to the value of mentoring and pair employees with role models.

Break Down Silos

Naturally occurring mentoring is usually confined to an employee’s existing sphere within the company. A facilitated process can intentionally match employees with mentors outside of their department or function to open up communication and understanding across silos. The cross-department pairing also helps reinforce the safe place a mentor strives to create.

Engage Employees

Employees who have mentors report being more engaged in their jobs. Mentoring helps employees build skills and confidence while giving them a place to share frustrations and be heard. In addition, many mentors feel more engaged themselves by working with a protégé.

Transfer Wisdom

Leaders possess years of valuable experience and perspective that helps them be effective in their roles. A facilitated mentoring program creates a path to sharing that wisdom with a generation of emerging leaders, passing on lessons learned and best practices that otherwise would not be accessible.

Create Connections

Global organizations can feel inaccessible to many employees, with business units and regional offices that make a company feel large and intimidating. By creating connections across business units and geography, a facilitated mentoring program can create bridges across different parts of the organization to help employees feel more connected. Both mentors and protégés are often grateful for the opportunity to learn about another part of the company’s business.

“Chance only favors the mind which is prepared.”
~ Louis Pasteur

Why The Mentor’s Way™?

The Mentor’s Way™ and The Protégé’s Journey™ are built on decades of experience with companies and programs of all sizes to design robust programs, support participants on their mentoring journey, and measure program outcomes.

The Mentor's Way: Eight Rules for Bringing Out the Best in Others

“Not only does Nemanick properly encourage us to broaden the traditional definition of a mentor―more importantly, he provides actionable advice about how to become a more impactful mentor within this expanded definition. By realizing that mentoring can range from a single inspiring interface to a formal relationship with a protégé, people in leadership positions should feel moved, if not obligated, to share their knowledge and experience more readily to bring out the best in others.” ~ Sharon John, CEO of Build-A-Bear Workshop

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“The journey matters as much as the goal.”
~ Kalpana Chawla

Why The Mentor’s Way™?

It is easy to underestimate what it takes to create a truly engaging mentoring experience. Some companies inform participants that they have been matched and expect them to figure it out for themselves. Others rely on impersonal mentoring platforms to match and teach employees how to build a mentoring partnership. The Mentor’s Way™ and The Protégé’s Journey™ are built on decades of experience with companies and programs of all sizes to design robust programs, support participants on their mentoring journey, and measure program outcomes. Our experience ranges from small, 20-pair programs to large programs with more than 250 pairs as well as from local, in-person mentoring to truly global programs.

ROADMAP TO DESIGNING A PROGRAM

We have built a roadmap for creating a successful program that has been tested and refined in dozens of organizations across many industries. We blend these best practices with a client’s talent strategy and culture to create programs that stand the test of time.

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ROBUST TRAINING SOLUTION

Over 20,000 mentors and protégés have gone through our training process, built around Rik’s Eight Rules of Mentoring [LINK]. Participants learn the phases through which mentoring partnerships pass and Rules for Mentoring that help them be successful. Rather than create a highly structured experience that can feel forced, we provide guidance to keep protégés and mentors in charge of their own experience.

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TOOLS AND RESOURCES FOR SUCCESS

In addition to a clear set of rules for mentors and protégés, we provide practical tools and resources that help program participants build and sustain successful partnerships. From initial meeting templates to goal-setting guides to career discussion tools, participants have access to the tools they need to structure the mentoring experience that works best for them.

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ONGOING SUPPORT FOR MENTORING PAIRS

Mentoring programs experience a lot of energy at the beginning when relationships are new and training is fresh. But, over time, protégés can lose focus or energy for mentoring. We provide support throughout the program to reenergize pairs, including newsletters with links to resources that mentoring pairs can use and reenergizing sessions to bring participants together to share learnings and renew focus.

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PROGRAM EVALUATION

After spending all of the energy creating and launching a mentoring program, it would be good to know if it is working. We can provide tools to evaluate programs, both from a formative standpoint (are mentoring pairs meeting and making progress?) and a summative standpoint (are protégés accomplishing their goals for mentoring?) Our standardized surveys allow clients to benchmark their programs against others to provide valuable feedback to the design.

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