Identifying the purpose of your mentorship program is an essential first step. In this guide, we break down the common goals of successful mentoring programs and the objectives that go with them.
CEO of Together
February 18, 2022
November 24, 2023
The goal of a mentorship program is to accelerate the personal and professional development of mentees. Whether it’s through one-on-one mentoring, reverse mentoring, or peer mentoring, employees develop new skills and grow their careers at a faster pace compared with training initiatives that don’t have a human element.
At Together, we’ve found that the key to a successful mentorship program is pinpointing a north star. A north star is the cornerstone of every effective mentoring program. It highlights the purpose or goal of the program and how it’s intended to benefit the company. Many HR and L&D professionals use Together's mentorship platform to realize their north star. Our platform replaces cumbersome, manually-run programs with customizable program templates that use our pairing algorithm to match hundreds (even thousands) of mentors and mentees instantly rather than spending weeks manually matching employees in spreadsheets. Whether you use Together or not, you need to have clear goals and objectives for your program. In this article, we’ll help you understand the best goals for your program and how to align your goals with your company's mission so you get executive buy-in and budget. Plus, we have actionable tips on running a successful mentorship program throughout the article.
Having clear goals for your mentoring program is an important part of its success. You should determine the purpose and then build a plan to fulfil that purpose. Wendy Axelrod, author of 10 Steps to Successful Mentoring, shares that the purpose of your mentorship program should always “be linked to some type of strategy, whether it is a talent development strategy, a diversity, an inclusion strategy, [or] a succession management process.”
Watch the full conversation: What Separates Successful Mentoring Programs From Those That Flop? Goals help with outlining your program priorities, setting benchmarks, finding clear objectives of outcome and providing a mechanism for individual improvement. So we know goals are important, but what should your goals be? Let’s explore in more detail the specific aims of workplace mentoring programs.
At Together, we strongly emphasize clearly defining the goals of your mentorship program. It sets the tone for the whole program. Among our customers, here are some of the most common objectives companies align on when building mentorship programs. Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is a popular goal-setting framework created by Google. We've found it helpful for mentorship program managers to use this framework when starting a program. Below, we'll list out the common OKRs. By aligning on what your OKRs are, it will make it easier to know what metrics you want to measure to determine the ROI of your mentorship program.
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The goals of a mentee are central to the success of the mentoring relationship. What do they want to get from meeting with a more experienced leader once or twice a month? Some may wish to gain visibility from leadership so they’ll be considered for new opportunities.
Other mentees may want to learn specific hard or soft skills like communication, negotiation, or conflict management.
Mentees can have several goals - let’s explore them below:
As you build and launch your mentorship program, you’ll notice that there’s nuance to how they run. For example, do all mentors and mentees pair at the same time, or can new participants join midway through the program? Additionally, how will you check in with mentoring pairs? Will it be weekly or monthly? And will you have them fill out a form or will it be anecdotal check-ins?
Let’s unpack some of these small, but important considerations. In doing so, you’ll start to form guidelines for how your mentoring program will run.
Many mentoring programs have a clear start and end date. This is helpful for measuring results and ensuring that all participants are on the same timeline. But what if an employee wants to join as a mentor or mentee midway through the program? Do they have to wait or is the program flexible enough to accommodate this?
At Together, companies running mentorship programs decide between cohort and (what we call) Evergreen mentorship models. Evergreen mentorship programs don’t have a start or end date. Employees can come and go, or continue for as many sessions as they find useful.
Depending on the goals of your program, Cohort or Evergreen models may make more sense. Each has its strengths.
Program managers play an important role in helping mentors and mentees build strong relationships. If there’s a mismatch between pairs, program managers need to quickly accommodate a switch. A worst-case scenario is that an employee suffers through an incompatible match without speaking up.
Program managers can use automatching software to guarantee that every pair is relevant and meaningful. Pairing algorithms like what we have at Together take into account employees' tenure, skills, goals, and preferences to match them with a hyper-relevant mentor.
Using pairing software also saves program administrators a lot of time. As one program administrator shared,
“The pairing for mentoring is seamless with the Together Platform. Prior to having the platform, it took at least 8 people and a couple of weeks to get it done.”
It’s important to make a good mentor match. But it’s equally important to check in with pairings throughout their relationship. Similar to the above point, this can help catch any issues like a mismatch. But it’s also important for generating reports on your program.
To get meaningful data on how the program is progressing you should be measuring your mentorship program. This includes things like how many mentors and mentees sign up and how often they’re meeting.
But you should also measure sentiment. Have them fill out feedback forms after each meeting by giving the meeting a rating out of 4. Likewise, check in with them midway through the program to ask several questions about how they feel about their mentor or mentee, the program, what they’re learning, and more.
Getting feedback not only helps you build a better program, but it gives you data you can use to prove its success to your leadership.
As you run your program, you may decide to switch things up. By offering different ways of pairing employees you can encourage new types of learning. For this reason, there are many different mentoring models you can choose to adopt.
Here are three worth trying out:
These are just a few of several types of mentoring programs organizations can run. Which one is best depends on the goals of the program.
Employees don’t need one more software to learn. In a digital world, they’re already wrangling a bunch of tools and a hundred different tabs. If you want to boost participation for your mentoring program, make it easy!
A mentorship software like Together seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Teams, which means mentors and mentees don’t need to open yet another tab. They can begin their mentoring journey right inside Teams by diving into their sessions. Participants and admins can choose to get mentoring alerts in their DMs or via email and never miss out on key updates.
The Together app embedded inside Microsoft Teams makes it easy for participants to browse matches without leaving the Teams environment.
By now, you should have a clear mission for your mentoring program that energizes you, the mentors and mentees, and the leaders of your organization.
The next step is starting the mentoring program. You’ll start planning out how to pair mentors and mentees, what resources they need to build a successful relationship, and how you’ll keep track of it all to demonstrate impact.
There’s a lot involved. We want to make it easy for you. That’s why Together’s mentorship software exists. It takes care of all the heavy lifting—the registration, the matching (we have an intelligent pairing algorithm), the reporting, and more.
Together is recognized by some of the biggest companies as the #1 easiest platform to manage your mentoring program.
