Kristin from our Customer Success Team shares how formal mentoring programs have benefitted her even though she was able to form mentoring relationships organically outside of them.
Mentoring may be happening around us naturally, but until we bring structure to the process, we may very well be letting great opportunities pass us by.
I’ve experienced peer mentoring with a colleague who joined a company at the same time as me. Although we didn’t define the relationship as mentoring, that’s what it was – “a mutually beneficial relationship between two people who share a common interest or goal or endeavour to support each other through similar career or life stages.” I was lucky enough to have engaged in it and benefited from it, but such informal mentoring experiences can often pass us by.
On the other hand, organized mentoring programs provide clear structure and support to mentoring that ultimately makes it more accessible to more people.
I was fortunate enough to have been exposed to organized mentoring early on in my career. The first company I joined after graduating automatically entered all employees into the program.
As part of the program, my mentor and I had a recurring meeting booked in the calendar from day one, so the bi-weekly cadence became standard straight away. As I got settled into the role and my days naturally got busier and my workload more demanding, it was often easier to put mentoring at the bottom of the priority list underneath responsibilities. However, my mentor helped me realize the power of investing time and effort in the short term to benefit you in the long run. Instead of using our time together to become even more hyper-focussed on the nitty-gritty of day-to-day work, she encouraged me to use our time together to consider the bigger picture and gain perspective.
Early on she taught me to view our meetings together as equally important as other staff meetings and work priorities. In fact, if I was feeling overwhelmed or like I couldn’t balance everything, it was even more important to have our mentoring meetings. It was the perfect development opportunity for me in time management, prioritization, or work-life balance.
Without the structure and accountability that come with a formal program, there were many weeks that would’ve gone by where one of us probably wouldn’t have prioritized the mentoring relationship. Yet those meetings that we would’ve skipped were probably the most important.
It’s quite well-documented how formalized mentoring programs benefit the organization. In my experience, formal mentoring programs greatly benefit people too. Here are a few ways I’ve found joining a mentoring program has benefited me.
Formalised Mentoring Programs Help Increase Self-Awareness
When you participate in a formal mentoring relationship, you start bringing consciousness to everyday actions, routines, habits and practices. Ultimately, this helps you understand how you’re spending your time and energy and make improvements where you think necessary.
For me, this came in the form of being made aware of my tendency to not live in the present. One of my mentors brought this to my attention, made me see the benefits, and as a result, I was able to make some intentional changes that greatly benefitted me in both my professional and personal life.
Formalised Mentoring Programs Help Develop Accountability
The formal nature of a mentoring program gives participants a sense of structure, and in turn, ensures that you’re always accountable to someone. And If you have a mentoring agreement with your mentoring partner, even better. Setting goals and expectations upfront helps formalize this and gives you a sense of responsibility in upholding your end.
If your program runs on Mentorloop, the platform encourages this even more through the Goals and Tasks feature. Writing your goals down and the tasks that you need to tick off to get there obviously helps, but the ability to share it with your mentoring partner makes it even better. It gives your mentoring partner visibility on how you’re progressing, thus also making them your accountability partner.
Formalised Mentoring Programs Help You Measure Your Progress
Mentoring programs usually come with some form or progress measurement. And while informal relationships help here too, there’s something about the structure of a formal program that gives progress tracking and measurement a boost. In formal programs,
On programs run on Mentorloop, mentors and mentees are able to set and track goals and tasks, set recurring meetings, keep notes, etc. and those are all put in place to help participants with documentation and tracking. But Meltorloop also makes sure that mentors and mentees are guided through mentoring milestones so they always know where they are, how far they’ve come, and what they need to do next to keep the momentum of progress going.
Formalised Mentoring Programs Support You
When you join a mentoring program, you get access to a program coordinator or sometimes even a team of program admins who run the program. That means if anything at all goes wrong, if you need a different mentoring match for whatever reason, or just need support or guidance with your mentoring journey, you have someone to help you sort out what you need.
On Mentorloop, we help program coordinators facilitate this support more efficiently. Mentorloop makes most of the admin required to run mentoring programs as easy as possible. With the Mentorloop Program Dashboard, program coordinators are able to easily keep track of the 5 key indicators of mentoring program success and are guided on how they can move the needle on each of them. What this means for program coordinators is that they can use their time to focus on what matters most – supporting mentors and mentees when they need it.
If your organization offers mentoring, I highly encourage you to consider joining it. It’s a great opportunity to develop yourself, even in ways that go far beyond your career. And if you don’t have one in your workplace, why not see if your industry association has one?
The right connection can change your life, and it’s out there just waiting for you to take the initiative to find it.
