Yes, you can be proactive about starting a mentoring culture in your organization.
No, you don’t have to wait for HR or management to champion this; YOU can be your organization’s own mentoring champion!
Here’s how.
Where You’re At
So, you already know that mentoring can have a lot of benefits for small teams—including better opportunities for everyone involved—and you now want to try out your own program.
You’re also happy to own this project—for now. While you as a team leader probably don’t foresee being a Mentoring Program Coordinator as something you do full-time, you do want to provide proof of concept.
Hopefully, this will lead to your HR and/or People & Culture department eventually adopting and owning this initiative so that it can ultimately take hold across the entire organization.
How To Get Where You Want To Go
The next step: how exactly do you do this? Here’s what we recommend.
1. Prepare Before You Launch
Let HR or management know you want to spearhead this initiative and why (hot tip: our Business Case for Mentoring tip sheet can help). Also, make sure you state your desire to see this eventually applied throughout the wider organization.
Let them know you’re happy to use your team as a pilot cohort, and that you’ll be submitting a report on how the pilot went. While you’re happy to manage this pilot, also note that you think a designated Program Coordinator would be best when the program is implemented more broadly.
2. Document, Document, Document
While documenting may sound tedious, it gives your HR and/or People & Culture team something to work with should they take this up after your pilot program.
By documenting how your mentoring initiative went, you’ll be able to show what worked and what didn’t, as well as how many hours you spent preparing, managing, measuring, and reporting on the program.
3. Find Your Champions
Which of your participants really loved the program? Get them to lend you their voices to advocate for wider implementation. This is one of the best ways to get buy-in from management and the C-Suite; if they’re hearing something’s working directly from their employees, they’ll be more likely to take your initiative—and its success—seriously.
Also make sure to point out how a mentoring program can supplement and enhance L&D efforts, including the fact that it’s 373 times cheaper than in-person training sessions and 680 times cheaper than executive coaching.
4. Measure and Report
People in management and the C-Suite tend to loooooooove numbers, so speak their love language! Both qualitative and quantitative reports are helpful, and thankfully, mentoring software can help with both.
That’s because no Program Coordinator wants to manually do metrics—especially if the goal is for your program to grow. That’s where Mentorloop’s Live Sentiment Dashboard comes in. It regularly surfaces both rich quantitative data and qualitative feedback from individuals on their mentoring relationships.
This not only removes the need to wait until the conclusion of the program to perform a survey but also allows programs to be ‘always on’, embedding a culture of mentoring in your organization.
Share Your Results With Other Team Leaders
Get other team leaders excited about your initiative. This will help ensure they’re already on board when it comes time for company-wide implementation. They can also be your supporting chorus line as you push for that implementation; once they see how well the program’s working for your team, they’ll want in ASAP!
At the end of the day, while taking the initiative to champion mentoring and starting a mentoring culture in your organization isn’t easy, going in with a strategy increases your chances of a positive result.
Check out our pricing page to learn more about our offering or see if starting your pilot on Mentorloop Lite is right for you (it’s free!), and then read this to get some guidance on running your pilot program. 😉
