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 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 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.