In Part 1 you learned that it’s important to have an overall strategy for mentoring in your organization. If you decide to add a planned mentoring component, you ought to 1) Develop and Sell Your Vision, 2) Consider Language, and 3) Identify Specific Purposes of the Initiative.

This month you’ll look at six final considerations: organizational support, potential champion, positioning, level of formality, delivery modes, and roadblocks.

4. Analyze Organizational Support

If your organization is financially solvent, at least some of the leadership is supportive, the target populations for the efforts are eager, and the organization isn’t overloaded with other “programs,” the timing and situation could be right for your initiative. On the other hand, if your organization is experiencing financial problems, downsizing, layoffs, large-scale reorganization, major legal investigations, unionization, or other challenges likely to take time and affect morale, the setting and timing probably won’t be right.

Perhaps more than any other organization development effort, planned mentoring needs support from the top down. If top-level leaders believe in, talk about, and want to improve mentoring, you’ll have a far better chance of succeeding than if they don’t—or even if they’re neutral on the idea. Will management’s verbal support be backed up with their own time investment, financial support to cover at least a part-time coordinator, training, learning resources, and other costs? The mentoring program of MDU Resources Group, Inc., is stronger because their CEO, Martin White, not only supports the effort but serves as a formal mentor. How supportive will HR be of this effort? How much actual help can they give?

Which change efforts seem to work in your organization, and which ones struggle or fail? What happened to a recent effort to initiate a major change or improvement? Which ideas were well received and carried out? Why did they succeed, and what can you learn from those experiences?

5. Choose Appropriate Champion(s)

Are you the appropriate champion? Why or why not? If you’re not sure, ask people who’ll be frank with you. Who else can and should be on the planning team? If some of you start the process, can others step in later as needed? Who else can you add? How are these individuals perceived in the organization? Do you have sufficient mentoring expertise in-house or do you need to call in some experts? Can you afford this? What can you get for free or very little from the Internet, professional associations, and other sources?

6. Consider Positioning

Make your planned activities part of a larger scheme, for example, new employee orientation; employee, management, leadership, or career development; or succession planning. Link the two efforts. For example, if your mentoring initiative is part of your career development thrust, point to resources (people, websites, written forms, speakers) involved in other career development activities. Where will you “house” your initiative? Some are part of formal HR departments. Others are purposely not in HR and are positioned in sales, manufacturing, or another function.

7. Decide Levels of Formality

A comprehensive mentoring effort will include several options.Completely informal, leave-it-entirely-to-chance approach to mentoring is going on right now within your organization and will probably continue indefinitely without your doing anything. The difficulty with this completely informal approach is that numerous outstanding individuals are left out. Because of shyness, or a quiet style, or unawareness of how the new mentoring works, they don’t enter into partnerships.

Consider adding enhanced informal mentoring, which is more intentional, planned, or formal. Using this approach, you encourage and prepare individuals at all levels of the organization to consider and to develop mentoring partnerships on their own. They decide the level of formality they want to use. You provide some learning resources and other assistance.

Consider formal mentoring partnerships. Arrange a certain number of mentoring pairs or groups who will meet for a specified period of time. Recruit, screen, select, match, train, and monitor/encourage participants as they work on agreed-upon contracts. Repeat the sequence for additional pairs and groups as long as needs and benefits exist. Implement learning/networking events, and hold a celebration at the end of each cycle. Communicate extensively with participants, leaders, and others throughout the organization, and evaluate all aspects of the initiative.

8. Choose Delivery Modes

Does it make sense for mentoring to occur in pairs or in mentoring groups? Both have advantages and disadvantages. Can you possibly offer pairs and groups?

9. Identify Roadblocks

Program roadblocks at the onset can include: having no appropriate sponsor, views that planned mentoring (e.g. for diversity groups) only emphasize exclusion, difficulty finding sufficient helpers, and time pressures.

Here are suggestions we made to the nonprofit leader:

• Consider a low-key form of enhanced informal mentoring.
  
• Craft your own vision of how mentoring could look and feel. Talk about the topic and how mentoring has helped you.
  
• Explain how you’d like to use mentoring skills with all of them (without being anyone’s formal mentor) and also how you’d like to support their efforts to seek mentoring from others IF they’re interested.
  
• Provide reading materials on mentoring in the learning center. See if anyone is interested in being on a team to investigate mentoring and how it may (or may not) fit with the organization’s core values and mission.
• Then see what happens!