Scaling a Mentoring Program

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In my work with and within organizations that have mentoring programs I'm invariably asked about a common challenge: The program is getting extremely popular so how do we scale (expand) it?

Typically mentoring programs are set up by the Human Resources, Employee Training or Organizational Development department. These teams tend to be small and are made up of extremely resourceful (no pun intended) people who creatively do a lot for a company with very, very little. And while running a mentoring program does not usually require a lot of cold, hard cash it does take a lot of coordination, communication and time for it to be really successful.

Most formal mentoring programs are set up similarly with people signing up to be a mentor, a mentee or both. The signup usually includes a short profile that needs to be filled in by the applicant and includes questions about interests and expectations of the program. Once the deadline passes and the application period closes the daunting task of matching mentors and mentees is left up to the small team running the program. The time it takes for the team to read every mentor application, every mentee application, cross reference and discuss each possible match and then communicate the final mentor/mentee pairing decision is enormous. The folks involved in the matching exercise also have their "day jobs" thus extending the matching period even longer than first estimated.

As mentoring programs get more popular and companies find themselves with more applicants the pairing phase gets exponentially longer. In many instances this growth ends up freezing the pairing process. The program eventually becomes too successful for itself and gets put on hold never launching its next wave of mentoring relationships.

What can be done?

My answer to the matching bottleneck is for mentoring programs to put the onus back on the mentee to find their own match. I advise mentoring program coordinators to stop laboriously force matching people with the likely result that several of those pairs won't be good fits. Those program coordinators would instead spend that time:

1. Advertising and communicating about the program. A key part of a mentoring program's success is a company's visible support of the activity. This company backing essentially gives people "permission" to spend time seeking out mentors and enriching themselves with this activity.
2. Offering learning sessions about what to look for in a prospective mentor and how to approach them.
3. Offering learning sessions on how to be a good mentor and how to be a good mentee.
4. Brainstorming with prospective mentees to come up with a candidate mentor list - a list of people they should consider approaching.

The above approach allows a small group of folks to set up a supportive structure for mentees. Mentor/mentee pairs who are not force matched have a far better chance of being successful because the participants picked each other with little direct intervention from an "outside" person. I see this as a win-win-win situation for all parties involved.

Mentoring for the Wrong Reasons

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My main goal with the OnMentoring blog and YouTube channel is and has always been to inspire people to find or to become career mentors. It is usually far easier to convince someone to be a mentee compared to a mentor because the benefits are more obvious from the mentee's perspective. So this posting is highly unusual for me in that I want to refer to an article entitled "Mentor or Martyr? Beware the Rescuer Trap" by Manfred Kets de Vries about a set of circumstances when you should not become or continue as a mentor.

The article uses the term "Rescuer" to essentially mean someone who cannot separate their own emotional needs from those of the person they are trying to help. To the Rescuer the act of mentoring is more to fill a void in their own life rather than help another. Serial rescuers "feed off a vulnerable and dependent person and feel satisfied when able to elicit gratitude and appreciation". In other words a "rescuer" is in it for themselves which is the antithesis of why one should be mentoring. The article includes a set of insightful questions a mentor can ask themselves to ensure they are not "Rescuers". It's a really good read.

I'd like to share some additional bad reasons to be acting as a mentor:

1. Don't do it to "look good" or "get promoted". As in the rescuer situation above someone that's mentoring solely so they look good to their own management is much too focused on themselves to be of any real use to a mentee.
2. Don't do it purely to network. While networking is a likely outcome of most mentoring relationships one shouldn't become a mentor in order to immediately gain access to a mentee's contact list. The reverse is also true.
3. Don't mentor as a replacement for good leadership. I've occasionally seen managers who were having problems leading their own team go and take on a mentee.  I can only speculate as to reasons why. Perhaps it was to make themselves feel worthy of their management role. In this situation I very strongly urge that person work on making their own team and their own relationships successful before dedicating any time to mentoring others.

Of course most people do not fall into any of these categories and so I continually ask everyone to consider becoming someone's mentor. And if you do happen to fall into one of these categories hopefully the issue can be resolved and you have a bright mentoring future ahead of you.