Hi,

This is my first post to this board, so I apologize in advance if I do anything that is out of line with the norms.

We're a services company with locations across North America. Our CEO is interested in having us offer a mentoring program as a learning option for ongoing professional development, so I'm trying to better understand how successful mentoring programs work.

I'd love to hear about:
* a successful program you've launched, and why it worked
* "lessons learned" from less effective programs
* helpful resources for creating / coordinating a mentoring program.
* anyone who facilitates a good program now that might be open to having a quick phone call to discuss it.

I do plan on doing some level of needs analysis also. i'm at the information gathering stage.

Thanks!

I have experience with mentoring programs in two different jobs, including my current position. The main thing I've learned is that mentoring programs are very challenging to get right. You have to go into with an iterative mindset, that is to say not expecting to get it right the first time.

A few critical success factors based on my experience: a good matching process, allowing the mentee to have input in picking his or her mentor, providing some initial training on roles and responsibilities, requiring some sort of contract or agreed upon goals and activities, and providing new mentoring pairs with suggestions and examples of what they can do together.

I tend to take a very decentralized, unstructured approach to learning and development programs, but have found that a mentoring program does require a fair degree of structure. Letting a thousand flowers bloom just doesn't work.

Good luck,
Tim

Tim, this is great feedback.I was suspecting it requires a fair amount of structure.

How did you go about the matching process? And did participants (mentor and mentee) seem to buy into the written agreement?

I have a set of free mentoring guidelines on my website that might prove useful.

Learningagent,
I have been involved in two different mentoring programs in differnent organizations. In the first, they identified a pool of mentors and posted their bios on the web. Then the mentees could go look and pick a prospective mentor, contact him or her, and take it from there. In the second case, we initially had senior management assign mentors. Then we refined it to give mentees a choice and input into the matching. Still don't know if this is the best solution.

As for the written agreement, the level of acceptance of that varied. Some mentors welcomed it but others thought it was a bother. I still think it's worth putting it out there so at least people can be exposed to the idea, hoping that they'll understand its utility and purpose.

Hope this helps.
Tim