5 Step Guide for Successful Mentorship Programs

Step 3. Match Mentors and Mentees

A productive mentoring relationship depends on a good match.

Properly matching mentors and mentees is often one of the most challenging aspects of a program. Participants will bring various competencies, backgrounds, learning styles and needs. A great match for one person may be a bad match for another.

Matching starts by deciding which type of matching you’ll offer in your program: self-matching or admin-matching. Consider allowing mentees to select a particular mentor or submit their top three choices. Self-matching is administrative light, which in larger programs can be a huge plus.

For more structured programs, such as large groups of new students or new corporate employees, you may want to get the program started by bulk, or admin matching. Utilizing software that pairs mentors and mentees can also be valuable. Evaluating various match combinations before finalizing as ensuring quality mentors for hard-to-match mentees can be challenging.

Three steps to successful mentor matching:

1. Create user profiles with rich data like gender, college, interests, and job function
2. Decide on your method: self-matching or admin-matching
3. Intelligently match based on profiles, improving match quality while saving time through mentoring software

Matching best practices start with a solid profile for all participants (mentors and mentees). Critical profile elements include:

• development goals
• mentoring goals
• specific topical interests
• location
• experiences
• matching preferences

Think about how you’ll want to match people, or if you’ll want them to match themselves. For example, you may want to match female leaders with younger female employees, or experienced sales personnel with new recruits. For self-matching, perhaps participants might like to connect with someone from the same previous employer, or the same college. The more you know about your participants, the better chance your program will have a positive outcome.

Regardless of self or admin matching, see how the Chronus platform makes matching faster and easier with strong, intelligent matching capabilities.

How Chronus mentor matching works

Step 4. Guide Your Mentoring Relationships

Now that your participants are enrolled, trained, and matched, the real action begins.

It is also where mentoring can get stuck. Left to themselves, many mentorships will take off and thrive. But some may not. Why? Because mentoring is not typically part of one’s daily routine. Without direction and a plan, the mentoring relationship is vulnerable to losing focus and momentum. That is why providing some structure and guidance throughout the mentorship is vital to successful mentoring programs.

One best practice in successful mentoring programs is to ensure all mentorships have goals and action plans. This serves two purposes:

1. It brings focus at the onset, which helps a mentoring relationship get off to a good start.
2. It adds accountability to accomplish something.

Provide all mentoring relationships with timely and relevant “help resources” (topical content, mentoring best practices, etc.) throughout the mentorship. Bite-sized content delivered at key points is ideal.

As a mentoring connection progresses, establish checkpoints where mentorships report on their progress. Lastly, have a formal process that brings closure to the mentoring experience. This process should account for:

• an opportunity for both the mentor and mentee to reflect upon what was learned
• discussion of next steps for the mentee
• feedback on the benefits of the program and process

Chronus mentoring software makes guiding or facilitating your program’s connections easy, enabling your participants to be highly productive.

Guidelines for mentors and mentees

Step 5. Measure the Impact of Mentorship Programs

Understanding how your program measures up to expectations may well be the most important phase of all.

Starting a mentorship program is a significant investment when you consider program management, infrastructure, and the valuable time of participants. Articulating the ROI of mentoring is essential to secure ongoing funding and support. In addition, the measure phase is also focused on assessing program health to identify trouble spots and opportunities.

Successful mentorship programs should be tracked, measured, and assessed at three altitudes: the program, the mentoring connection and the individual. To be effective you need the ability to capture metrics and feedback throughout the program lifecycle.

At the program level, build metrics around defined business objectives. For example, in a DEI mentorship programs you may want to compare promotion rates of program participants to non-participants. Also track “funnel” conversion metrics, which show the progress participants make at each step of the mentoring program starting at enrollment. Conversion metrics provide essential insight into program health.

For mentoring connections, you want to understand mentorship behavior to identify roadblocks and opportunities. Common questions you will want to ask are:

• Is the mentoring timeframe too long, too short, or just right?
• Are mentorships getting off to productive starts or lagging behind?
• Are participants leveraging content resources you have provided?

For participants, you want to understand the impact of mentoring in terms of outcomes while acquiring program feedback. One of the easiest ways to capture outcome and feedback is through surveys. Ask participants and stakeholders how well the mentoring program met its goals and the goals of the organization. Also ask them for their ideas for improving the program.

You’ll also want to be sure you’re benchmarking your mentoring program in the areas of enrollment, matching and engagement — so you’ll understand if the performance you’re seeing is good, bad or average in comparison to other mentorship programs.

Not sure how to establish benchmarks? Check out our Mentoring Benchmarks Report: Quit Navigating in the Dark.

Examples of program reporting and mentoring success