How to Start a Mentorship Program

Decide Why You Want a Mentor Program

Goal: Set your program up to succeed by defining goals
and involving top execs.

The vast majority of mentoring programs fail because businesses
don’t know what they want to get out of the effort. “When
you have fuzzy program goals, you have fuzzy outcomes,” says Dr. Lois
J. Zachary, author of “Creating
a Mentoring Culture.” Some businesses start a program to help
newcomers adjust; others use it as a recruitment tool or a method of leadership
grooming. IBM started its program to build knowledge, foster learning, and connect
people in a company with 386,000 employees. The culture of mentorship runs so
deep that every IBM employee is either being mentored, mentoring others, or doing
both. “A lot of our people work virtually, and mentoring can erase
geographic and business-unit borders,” says href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Blue-Mentoring-Innovative-Organizational-Learning/dp/0137130848">Sheila
Forte-Trammell, who manages IBM’s mentoring programs.

Businesses should ensure that top management is involved in the
program and in its inception, otherwise it won’t get the attention
and enthusiasm it needs to become part of the business culture. “You
should have their understanding and their support. That is absolutely one of
the keys,” says Barry Arbuckle, CEO of MemorialCare Medical Centers,
a six-hospital system in Southern California that uses mentoring as part of its
development program for middle managers. The company’s chief
operating officer, not human resources executives, runs the company’s
mentoring and leadership program.

Pair Up Proteges and Mentors

Goal: Create profiles and match people according to your
goals.

Identify how many people should be mentored and who they will
be. Will it be new recruits, managers, or promising young leaders? Next, create
a similar profile for ideal mentors. If you hope to use the program to aid
recruitment, seek out those who like teaching younger people. If your goal is
to groom the next generation of leaders, then team them up with top-level
managers. People who have been on the protege side before often make good
mentors, says Dawn Plimmer, the associate vice president of learning and
performance at Nationwide Insurance.

How to match up promising junior talent with mentors? You can
ask managers to set up matches, have human resources do it randomly, let people
pick each other, or have them fill out forms and match them based on skill sets
or goals. IBM relies on an online database that lets employees search for their
own mentors.

At Nationwide, human resource executives found themselves
over-thinking the matches according to technical discipline and personality.
Now, they’ve made it much more random, and it works better. “We
were trying to engineer the relationships,” Plimmer says. “There
is such a wide spectrum of things you are bringing to that relationship, and we
were only looking at a couple of dimensions.”

Larger businesses often encourage matches between people from
different parts of the country or from different operations of the business.
That removes the relationship from the traditional management chain and paves
the way for cross-company knowledge exchange. For some people, the separation
fosters trust more easily than a relationship between people who see each other
every day. Even with no ulterior motives, Forte-Trammell says, a perfectly
sincere manager can set up an apprentice for failure by blurring the
distinction between assigned tasks and mentored activities. “It’s
penalty-free speaking,” says Sharon Sadowski, an IBM product manager
in Chicago who talks monthly with her mentor, Lindsay-Rae McIntyre, a human
resources manager in Rochester, Minn.

Set the Rules for Engagement

Goal: Make sure people meet regularly — and
know what to talk about when they do.

Before employees launch into their mentoring relationships, help
both people determine the focus and purpose of why they’re doing
this. Is it to develop a particular skill, create a career plan, or orient new
employees? Encourage them to share learning styles, goals, bios, and resumes to
build a development plan. “Because the mentee knows what they want to
get out of the relationship, it’s a good idea to let them schedule
the meetings and decide what they should talk about,” Plimmer says.

Partners should also establish how often to meet and how they’ll
communicate. Without that, the mentor may not build the time into his or her
schedule, leaving the other person feeling frustrated. Monthly meetings that
last an hour or two are pretty common, but in some more intensive mentoring relationships
the partners could chat daily or weekly. To build trust, Forte-Trammell says
both partners should know that nothing about the relationship is to be reported
to anyone in the company and that no one will be evaluated or given a “grade.”
Encourage employees to do periodic checks to be sure they’re on track
to hit goals and determine if the relationship is really working.

In some cases, setting an end date can be helpful, so the two
can part ways and avoid a messy and awkward “breakup.” “There
is a point where you can continue the relationship or it’s time to
move on and learn from someone else,” Plimmer says. Be sure those who
work well together know they are free to extend the relationship if they want
to. IBM’s McIntyre and Sadowski have kept their relationship going
for more than four years. On the phone and over e-mail and instant message,
McIntyre has walked Sadowski through several job changes within the company and
provided a sounding board within a huge organization. “I can’t
imagine my career without Lindsay-Rae,” Sadowski says.

Keep Tabs on the Program

Goal: Make sure mentoring is providing the results you
want.

Although the relationships are mostly left up to participants
and are best not micromanaged, businesses should keep tabs on how the program
is going and check in at least once a quarter, says Les McKeown, author of href="http://mentoringprogramdesign.com/">The Complete Guide to Mentoring and
Coaching Program Design, who has helped create programs for Siemens,
Pella Windows and Doors, and United Technologies.

“Don’t assume no news is good news,”
says Roberta
Chinsky Matuson, president of Human Resource Solutions, based in
Northampton, Mass. Measure whether your program is meeting your goals. If your
goal is to increase the number of women in senior management, what do those
numbers look like? If it’s to identify high fliers for promotion in
the company, then be sure deserved proteges are getting promoted. Surveys or
one-on-one interviews can offer feedback on training, problems, and matchmaking.
To figure out if the program is helping junior employees, McKeown recommends
that businesses check in with their direct mangers, because they can tell
better than anyone else if the relationship is working or not.

Be patient: the payoff for mentorship is hard to judge and can
often take years to show results. At Memorial Care, mentoring of middle
managers has paid off in succession planning. Ten years ago, when the program
started, the hospital network hired internal people for top management jobs
just 35 percent of the time. Today it’s up to 73 percent of the time.