Keeping mentors and mentees motivated and engaged is crucial to a mentoring program’s success, yet creating an environment that fosters engagement can be challenging. It’s a common concern among our customers and the solution varies depending on a program’s maturity. We’ve identified several engagement strategies and habits that Program Coordinators can adopt to sustain momentum. However, sometimes a program needs some structure and guidance to give it renewed energy.
Enter mentoring challenges! In this article, Georgia Pascoe, Mentorloop’s Head of Customer Success, explores these challenges—what they are, the various types available, and how to effectively implement them throughout your program for the best results.
What are mentoring challenges?
Mentorloop’s Mentoring Challenges are time-bound initiatives designed to achieve key goals in a mentoring journey or enhance it by introducing new concepts or practices. Guided by our team of mentoring experts, these challenges engage participants and maintain momentum in your mentoring program.
Types of Mentoring Challenges and how to use them
We currently have three active mentoring challenges: Goal Setting, Group Mentoring, and Reverse Mentoring Conversations. These challenges can be implemented at any time throughout the year. We also provide comprehensive resources for program coordinators, enabling them to seamlessly integrate these challenges into any program and effectively support participants.
Now, when it comes to choosing the right challenge for your mentoring program — we have some recommendations based on your program type and its level of maturity.
So let’s dive in!
Goal Setting Challenge
This challenge is designed to show participants the importance of goal setting and encourage them to set meaningful goals and share them with their mentoring partners.
What it will help you achieve:
The goal setting challenge will help you achieve better visibility on what your participants are working on and how they’re tracking towards their goals. It also promotes better accountability from your participants because, as we know, sharing goals with an accountability partner keeps people motivated to work towards their goals. And when your participants are productive, your program is too.
Program compatibility:
This challenge is suited to all program types (always-on, on-off, or cohorts)
The best time to run this challenge:
Typically, we suggest you run this within the first year of your mentoring program, especially if your participants are new to mentoring and require more structure and guidance.
Learn more about the Goal Setting Challenge here
Group Mentoring Challenge
This challenge is designed to encourage participants to interact with other like-minded program participants through groups based on skills that they are interested in developing.
What it will help you achieve:
The group mentoring challenge helps programs achieve a 100% match rate, even with an uneven mentor-to-mentee ratio. It introduces your people to diverse colleagues they might not otherwise interact with, exposing them to new thoughts, perspectives, and solutions. By encouraging group participation, you provide an alternative learning and development environment that complements one-to-one mentoring relationships and supports progress towards individual goals.
Program compatibility:
This challenge is suitable for both Always-On and Cohort mentoring programs.
If your program runs entirely separate cohorts for each mentoring cycle, you can set up your groups at the beginning of your program alongside 1:1 loops.
The best time to run this challenge:
We recommend exploring group mentoring for more mature programs so this is great for programs in its second year onwards. This gives participants time to be familiar with mentoring and the one-to-one mentoring process before expanding their network through participating in group mentoring.
Learn more about the Group Mentoring Challenge here
Reverse Mentoring Conversations Challenge
This challenge is designed to encourage mentoring pairs in your mentoring program to engage in reversing their roles as mentors and mentees.
What it will help you achieve:
The reverse mentoring challenge helps maintain momentum in your program by encouraging mentors and mentees to engage in their relationships from a fresh perspective. It prompts them to explore new discussions they might not have considered otherwise.
Program compatibility:
This challenge is particularly well-suited for Always On mentoring programs. However, in certain circumstances, it can also be appropriate for programs that operate in cohorts. If your mentoring program regularly welcomes new cohorts and has many participants who engage year after year, they may still find this challenge valuable. For personalized advice, we recommend consulting a mentoring expert or your Mentorloop customer success manager.
The best time to run this challenge:
The reverse mentoring challenge is best suited to more mature programs so we recommend it for mentoring programs that have been running for three years or more.
Learn more about the Reverse Mentoring Conversations Challenge here
Final Thoughts
Mentoring Challenges are an excellent tool for Program Coordinators who want to provide a more structured mentoring program or evolve the mentoring experience beyond typical 1:1 mentoring. Think of Mentoring Challenges as your playbook for best-practice mentoring initiatives that will engage your participants!
We know that building a culture of mentoring is an investment, and you don’t want to see your efforts go to waste through disengagement — neither do we! So leverage our tried and tested strategies to maintain and grow your mentoring offering, ensuring participants remain engaged, setting your program up for lasting impact.
