Implementing a company mentoring program will be your wildly successful legacy or perhaps your administrative nightmare. The main difference lies in creating a powerful, employee-inspired, effective program.
As an employee benefit, a powerful mentoring program can actually develop your current team and attract new talent. A mentoring program is the best chance to leverage the abilities and strengths of the employees in order to train and develop one another. And when designed properly, a mentoring program can enhance leadership skills, soften departmental barriers, increase employee effectiveness, and boost morale. For far more details, you need to check out:
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Alternatively, a poorly planned mentoring program may become an administrative nightmare. The responsibility of designing, implementing and maintaining a mentoring program often falls around the already-full plate of the HR director or diversity manager. And an ineffective mentoring program runs the risk of frustrating the workers (and you!) and negatively impacting morale.
The following are nine guidelines for creating a powerful, employee-inspired, effective mentoring program:
1. Define Your ability to succeed
As early as possible, define your program's success factors in measurable ways and then design your program to accomplish this success. For instance, among LifeMoxie's clients made a mentoring program to improve membership in the company-sponsored affinity groups. Another LifeMoxie client is using this program to decrease attrition in the workforce and develop its mid-tier managers.
2. Give them a Reason to sign up
Time matters, especially on the job. If you want your employees to sign up in your mentoring program, give them an incentive to sign up or obligate them to identify their own reasons for participating. For example, encourage participation within the program by looking into making it an issue in annual performance reviews.
3. Inflate Mentoring Myths
Mentoring often connotes "a guide for your very existence," like the character Obi-Wan Kenobi in the movie Star Wars. Consequently, employees often anticipate finding that certain special lifetime mentor in someone of the highest ranks of the company. The truth is, everyone on your team could be a Mentor and everybody, regardless of level, can usually benefit from a mentoring program. Encourage employees to sign up as both a Mentor and a Mentee inside your program so they learn from as well as develop one another.
4. Think like a Dating Service
Because the catalyst of the mentoring program, consider yourself a dating service for that professional growth and development of your employees. As a result you need to give a method for people to find one another (think Match.com) while providing them the dwelling in which to make good matches (think matchmaker). Teaching people how to take part in their own matching can create more effective mentoring relationships while giving them lifetime mentoring skills, and can also require the employees to be proactive within the finding and creating of their mentoring relationships. Your challenge would be to implement a program that mixes the very best of all successful online dating services.
5. Teach them How you can Mentor
To produce a highly effective mentoring program, you have to teach the participants how to be effective Mentors and Mentees. Incorporate ongoing Mentor/Mentee training and educational opportunities, and provide your participants with tools for creating structure in their relationships. Your ultimate goal is to teach them how you can create their own mentoring relationships so that your mentoring program becomes an employee-inspired, employee-generated program year after year.
6. Make them Commit
Make it a requirement that everyone that goes into a mentoring relationship must sign a mentoring agreement. In addition, require your participants to invest in the connection for a certain period of time, preferably 3 to 6 months, while providing each party the opportunity to get yourself a no-fault split if the relationship not be working.
7. Mentor around Specific Goals
As your participants start creating mentoring relationships, cause them to become focus on specific goals that the Mentor and Mentee generate together. Having goals can create focus and bring about the effectiveness of their relationship.
8. Allow it to be Easy to Play
There's nothing worse than an interested, inspired employee that becomes frustrated using the process. Make it easy to participate in your mentoring program, easily accessible the mentoring tools and information, and simple for you to administer.
9. Track Everyone's Progress
Encourage your participants to trace their progress within the program as well as their progress on their own goals. Incorporate a mechanism for participants to supply their feedback on their own relationship as well as on the mentoring program.
Ann Tardy, JD, CPA Founder/CEO of LifeMoxie!
Ann Tardy may be the founder and Chief Catalyst of LifeMoxie!, the performance impact company. LifeMoxie is committed to engaging people in their use strategic mentoring solutions, professional skills training, and moxie! When companies crave an aggressive edge in the ever-changing, employee-driven world, LifeMoxie offers the tools to experience a bigger game making a greater impact.
Just before launching LifeMoxie!, Ann was an attorney for 14 years practicing corporate securities law at two of Silicon Valley's largest law firms. Subsequently, she managed the legal departments of the start-up that fell to the dotcom bust and a start-up that squeaked by to IPO, before launching her very own lawyer representing entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes.
During her tenure as in-house counsel, Ann also served for 5 years as the co-Director of the Entrepreneurial Education program at a girls' junior high school, training 12-year-old girls how to start and run businesses.
Ann earned a cpa degree in the University of Illinois, legislation degree from Chicago-Kent College of Law, a CPA in the State of Illinois, and licenses to rehearse law in Illinois and California.
Ann was honored as an Outstanding Business Woman of the season through the American Business Women's Association. Her first book is LifeMoxie! Ambition on the Mission - 9 Techniques for Taking Life by the Horns. She is a featured author in The best published in 2008 by Insight Publishing, and her next book around the power of mentoring will be released last year.For more details, you ought to pay a visit to:
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