Businesses and companies today increasingly prefer adopting mentorship as a way of growing and nurturing talent internally. When properly managed, mentorship enables companies to retain most of their staff while also increasing workers’ competency and career development. Building a successful mentorship program in your company requires an emphasis on five crucial areas.
Setting the Right Goals
Goal setting is an essential part of establishing a successful mentorship program. Setting the right goals for the program ensures that participants, including mentors and mentees, align themselves accordingly to meet the objectives. The objectives of the mentorship program should be geared toward facilitating the active exchange of skills and expertise within the workplace.
Defining the Mentors
Mentors are crucial entities, whose input facilitates the success of the mentorship program. It is vital, in this regard, to set the qualifications of individuals who can be shortlisted as mentors. The mentors should preferably be individuals within the business who have substantial professional experience. Choosing the right mentors and equipping them with the objectives of the mentorship program ensures that they add value to the mentees.
Choosing the Mentees
A set of criteria should define the process of selecting the beneficiaries of a mentorship program. It is essential to focus on working with mentees who show great potential and willingness to advance their skills in the workplace. The shortlisted mentees should also reflect the diversity within the company, by including men, women, and persons of different ages.
Choosing the Scope
A good mentorship program should be well defined in terms of the topics of focus. When starting a mentorship program in the workplace, these topics should be geared towards meeting a specific need. For example, mentees can be trained on how to use customer relations management software effectively if such software is intended to be introduced in the near future. Additional details that regard the mentorship program, such as the appropriate duration and venue of the mentorship sessions, should also be defined.
Rewarding and Celebrating Success
At the end of every mentorship program, the mentees should be allowed to showcase and practice their newly gained skills. Celebrating their accomplishment by giving them some new responsibilities with a commensurate salary and benefits incentivizes the entire mentorship program. It also helps bring new participants on board.