Mentors, here is the good news: it’s likely that all elements you need to carry out an effective mentoring program are already available within your company. Whether you’re just beginning a mentoring program or already have one in place, consider the following diagnostic checklist of effective mentoring practices to learn where you may want to make improvements to your process:
- Is mentoring a priority?
Mentoring is a management activity, not just a management responsibility. A mentor proactively and directly interacts with staff being mentored. If you are a mentor and your mentoring activities appear at least twice a week on your calendar, you are visibly and actively making mentoring a priority for both you and your mentee.
- How visible are your mentee’s assignments to upper management?
Mentored staff should be assigned a “real” project as soon as they join the work unit. The new staff as well as the mentor need to quickly develop a sense of where and how the mentee can contribute to projects that matter. If the mentee’s project is important enough to show up on the monthly or quarterly general management review agenda, it’s a highly visible assignment.
- How and how often do you review progress on assignments with your mentee?
Mentors should schedule a weekly review meeting for each project in which the mentored staff participate. Ask that the new staff prepare written weekly summaries in advance of the review meeting. The entire project team, as well as the new staff, benefit from this discipline of preparing written summaries in advance.
- What resources are available to your mentee to learn and navigate the workplace culture?
Mentors should introduce the new staff member to established staff members who can serve as resources for questions related to the key support tasks of daily life at the office/lab/shop. If resources are available and in place for the mentee to tap, you’ve effectively and usefully expanded your mentee’s internal network.
- How does your mentee learn about external market and industry dynamics that affect your business?
Mentors should schedule regular one-to-one “touch base” meetings not associated with performance evaluation activities. These “touch base” meetings should be office-based but without a formal agenda to allow free-ranging conversations. These more free-ranging conversations provide the opportunity for mentors to introduce forward-looking topics such as changing market or industry dynamics and the company’s planned responses to them.
- What are the opportunities to transition a mentor to assignments with greater responsibility/autonomy?
Mentors should treat mentored staff as adults, even if they are “junior” staff based on age or experience. Mentored staff are with your company to contribute and they want to contribute to the real project to which they’ve been assigned.
- What access does your mentee have to needed domain or subject matter experts within the company?
Both mentor and mentee should recognize and utilize the good will that usually exists among more experienced staff toward new, less experienced staff members. As the need arises, the mentor should identify other more senior staff who can serve as a resource for project-specific issues that arise during the course of the work. For mentees, senior staff input can help get projects “unstuck.” For senior staff, having a mentee succeed after following the guidance they provided is gratifying.
- Do your mentoring processes reflect needs unique to mentees “fresh out of school”?
Employees fresh out of school, with little or no prior experience in a corporate work environment, benefit from mentoring that addresses issues specific to that situation. Aside from all the issues addressed in the previous diagnostic/checklist points, there is the additional issue of these new-to-business employees being unfamiliar with aspects of business that all of your experienced employees take for granted, e.g., company/business vocabulary; firm business and financial objectives; company communications, both top down and horizontal; and ways in which different departments interact with each other. Review the content and format of your orientation sessions, perhaps with the input from a fresh-from-school employee who joined a year or two ago, to identify gaps in your existing onboarding practices and how to fill them.
- Do you have a mentoring process that specifically addresses senior level mentees?
A key marker of senior-level employees is strategic thinking. Thinking and acting strategically is a transferable skill – one that enhances a mentee’s prospects for advancement to other roles within the company. Through all of the mentor-led discussions described previously, the mentee herself begins to think and act strategically, strengthening the alignment between her personal professional goals and those of the company. If the mentee is fully engaged in producing outcomes that the company values, she will be noticed – and noticed favorably – by her colleagues. As a mentor, once you see that happening, you know you’ve contributed effectively to your mentee’s career development
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