Ok - the title of this posting is a little direct: Formal Mentoring - Get Serious Will You.  So what is it all about?

It's about organisations who are only willing to 'give mentoring a try' for short amounts of time.  You know - let's do a 3-month pilot mentoring program.  Relationships take time to build and any organisation serious about fostering a mentoring culture, either formal or informal (or both), will know that you need more than 3 months to do this.

I want to share this quick true story with you to illustrate my point.  I was managing a national mentoring program that paired university students with people in their chosen profession who acted as the mentors.  It was a totally voluntary role for the mentors with no payment involved.  At the end of one of the annual programs, a mentor rang me to say that she thought she had not really done much for her mentee.  In fact - she really felt that she had not contributed to her development at all.  Aside from my conversation with the mentor about how mentees also needed to contribute - I got the general picture. She was a dedicated professional in her own right and personally felt that she had 'missed' some connection with her mentee along the way.

Now - let's go forward two years (yes - that would be 2 years folks).  I got another call from the mentor who had just received an email from her university student mentee. The mentee was now working in the profession and wrote an email to her mentor to say how much she had appreciated the mentor support and now that she was working in the field, many of the lessons learned and thoughts the mentor had shared with her were proving to be very helpful.  As you can imagine - the mentor was on cloud nine after receiving this very heartening email.

So what is the moral of the story?  Sometimes, the true impact of a formal mentoring program/relationship can take place AFTER the program has finished.  And so - when you only implement mentoring for a small amount of time, evaluate it and expect to see amazing results - you could be severely disappointed.

My advice is very straightforward on this matter.

If you are considering implementing a formal mentoring program, you should be prepared to take a stand and resource this program for a minimum of 3-5 years if you truly expect to see results for individuals and your organisation AND better still the movement towards more of a mentoring culture.  The breakdown of years is as follows:

Year 1: pilot of the program with the target group

Year 2: small expansion of the program with the target group with lessons learned applied

Year 3: embedding of the program into the development suite for the target group and the starting of a mentoring alumni or network of people with mentoring related skill sets PLUS you might also consider expanding mentoring into other target groups and/or using different models of mentoring

Year 4: continued mentoring approach, now with the added advantage of a higher profile of formal mentoring and the added advantage of developing capacity within the organisation to facilitate formal mentoring

Year 5: a smooth running program of mentoring within your organisation, potentially with multiple opportunities for mentoring and use of multiple models

Along the way, you can then develop a documented procedure set for how mentoring happens at your organisation and embed mentoring into the ongoing workforce development business case.

I'd love to hear your questions and thoughts on this topic - so do email to info@thementoringcentre.com.au.

Yours in mentoring

Gilly Johnson

Director & Founder