What is the importance of mentorship?
At its best, mentorship can play a major role in launching a promising employee’s career while setting your company up for sustained success. In order to guarantee this outcome, both the mentor and mentee must enter into the relationship with complete dedication and an idea of what they want to get out of the relationship. Set up properly, mentorship can be a mutually beneficial arrangement for both mentor and mentee.
Mentor/mentee relationship dynamics
Mentorship, at its core, involves someone with high skill or extensive experience formally helping a newcomer to an industry or profession. Most mentor/mentee relationships are informal and entered upon based on the goodwill of each party. The mentor has the time, ability and willingness to help the mentee and the mentee is eager to learn from someone more experienced or skilled than them. If the mentor agrees to take on a mentee but doesn’t have the time or is perhaps not as skilled as initially thought, they fail their mentee. Conversely, if the mentee is unwilling to listen or take direction from the mentor, they are wasting everyone’s time. This is no time to squander all of the work put into finding good employees.
A good mentor is patient and willing to share what they know, even if mentoring might be frustrating at times. Things they are accustomed to doing quickly will take more time if they need to also teach a mentee how to do it. Good mentors make mentees feel like they belong. Many new employees are uncomfortable in new settings and need time to figure out processes and relationships with their colleagues. A good mentor acts as buffer in these situations, introducing the mentee to the workload in a way that builds their confidence while allowing them to provide input. A good mentor also acts as a reference for the future. They know their mentees on a deeper level and can speak to their character and other soft skills.
The benefits of mentorship
As a mentor, you benefit from the prestige and respect that comes from helping shape someone’s career. You become known as someone with lots of information to pass on, and this improves your standing among your peers. If you do a good job of being a mentor, and the person you mentor happens to work for your company, you enjoy the satisfaction that comes with having nurtured and shaped a high-performing employee. Mentorship is also a great addition to your company’s onboarding plans. It has been shown that proper onboarding can increase employee retention and set your new hires up for success on the job much quicker.
Spending time and effort on proper mentorship can help introduce new employees to your company culture much faster. This is especially important for mentees, since it’s hard for anyone to succeed in an environment they haven’t warmed up to, let alone someone brand new to the industry. A proper mentorship can give “social proof” to the mentee, and confidence that they are able to make a measurable difference on the work your company does.
Mentorship in the workplace
Some companies include mentorship in their corporate benefits and compensation package, giving new employees a head start when they first join. In settings like this, the employee is paired with someone who has been at the company long enough to act as a mentor. These arrangements combine onboarding with mentorship, and are advantageous to the company, mentor and mentee. The company benefits by having engaged employees who contribute to the bottom line a lot quicker, the mentor benefits from being able to demonstrate their leadership and management skills to their superiors, and the mentees benefit from having guidance in an unfamiliar situation.
Mentorship can also be across companies, and sometimes, mentors are retirees or freelancers who used to work in the industry but have left after attaining success. In cases like this, the mentor may choose to take on multiple mentees and do it purely for personal satisfaction and a feeling that they’re “passing the baton” to the next generation.
How to set up a mentorship program
If you’re interested in setting up a formal mentorship program at your company, there are a few steps you should take to ensure it works seamlessly for everyone involved.
First, you should take a holistic look at your employees and identify those you feel would make great mentors. These are typically the people who have been at your company they longest, but you can also choose people who’ve worked in the industry at large for many years before joining your company. These employees should exemplify leadership and the qualities you hope to pass on to new hires.
Next, approach the employees you’ve identified and ask if they would be willing to lend their time to mentorship. Hopefully, they are willing to volunteer, but it’s understandable if they lack time in their day to get all of their own work done, let alone their mentor’s. If you find you’re having trouble recruiting people to volunteer their time, find a way to incentivize mentoring. This could be an increase in pay, a training stipend or dedicated time each week for them to spend solely on mentoring. You could also offer leadership training opportunities to these employees, who will hopefully see this as a chance to enhance their skillset and open doors to professional advancement.
Finally, establish some sort of cadence with check-ins and measurement. Evaluating the success of a mentorship program comes down to how well your company performs on certain key metrics, such as employee retention, engagement, satisfaction and whether your company’s work output has increased in amount or quality. You may choose to let the mentors and mentees decide on a schedule that works for them as far as meetings and the content of their meetings goes, but at the very least, you must check in with your cohort of mentors semi-regularly to evaluate the success of the program. It helps to make tweaks as you go rather than wait for problems to get worse and eventually to a point where they become hard to fix.
Mentorship can reduce turnover, improve morale and potentially lead to the development of highly effective employees. Creating a formal mentorship program doesn’t need to be cumbersome or bureaucratic, as long as you have skilled, experienced employees to lead the way and are willing to deal with the growing pains and hiccups that can come with taking on employees who are not just new to your company but the industry as a whole.
