According to the US Department of Labor’s Dictionary of Occupational Titles, “mentoring is the most complex type of human interaction.” Mentoring is even more complex inside a structured mentoring program because the program must be planned and implemented so that each mentor and protégé meets the business purpose of the program. Using a proven “Define, Design, Deliver” process ensures success.

Poor planning equals poor results

Before contacting a mentoring firm, a major oil company had hired an external consultant to design a single mentoring program for 300 protégés. Because program and participant goals were ill-defined, many protégés were poorly matched with mentors. Program delivery consisted of training protégés and mentors separately without a coordinator to oversee the process.

The result was that 600 participants wasted valuable time over 12 months because the program did not achieve desired participant goals, nor did it reduce turnover or enable career exploration, as the organization expected.

Why did this costly failure happen? The mentoring consultant was operating at the Novice or Advanced Beginner level (see Table 1). Consultants at these lower levels might “know about” mentoring from readings or seminars, but lack the practical “know-how” needed to plan and align the components of a structured program and to implement the program to achieve the intended outcomes.

After the first year of operation, the oil company brought in another company and tasked it with salvaging the program. After visiting well-known mentoring experts across North America and England to learn firsthand what each could provide, the experts selected a firm with a proven track record providing mentoring programs at the Expertise level.

Putting expertise to work

The first step was a three-week site visit that allowed the new mentoring experts to visit the operator and establish the scope of work. Because it seemed unlikely that a single mentoring program was appropriate for all 300 protégés, the new consultants evaluated the existing scheme using surveys and structured interviews. This information gathering enabled the new experts to identify three types of proteges at different points in their career development who had different sets of needs that required different kinds of mentoring. While this evaluation was under way, the consultants helped the new program administrator to assemble a mentoring task force, comprising representatives from each of the 12 participating business units. These representatives were educated as business unit coordinators and trainers.

With valuable input from the mentoring task force and a focus group made up of business unit stakeholders and participants, the consultants facilitated collaborative planning to define and design three mentoring programs.

In the Orientation Mentoring Program, which targeted newly hired university graduates, peers served as mentors. A Protégé Needs Inventory was created to enable each protégé to identify specific needs so that mentors could provide assistance.

The Career Expansion Mentoring Program was designed to reduce turnover of personnel with high potential at a time when promotion was not possible. The program enabled employees to expand their technical expertise by carrying out a highly challenging mentor-assisted project in the mentor’s area of expertise. This type of transfer of complex knowledge and expertise will be critical before the Baby Boomers retire.

The third program, the Career Exploration Mentoring Program, was guided by technical and managerial mentors to enable longer-term employees to choose a career path that benefitted them as well as the company.

Delivering the programs

Once programs had been defined and designed for three groups of protégés, each program needed to be implemented. Because the task force representatives knew their own business unit needs/goals and the participants, they were able to match mentor-protégé partners for the appropriate program.

Partners signed up to attend a two-day training course on Mentoring for Results. One objective in requiring partners to attend the same course was that they could get to know one another. The course offers a series of structured activities that enable partners to become comfortable discussing real issues so that mentoring begins to occur during the training session.

Using the Protégés Needs Inventory, partners agreed on the needs that would be addressed and prioritized them in the form of goals to be achieved. To enhance commitment and avoid potential problems, partners created a mentoring agreement that would guide future interaction. They discussed expectations (such as
who would initiate meetings), concerns (including what the pair would do if there were not enough time to meet), and anticipated benefits (such as what benefits the mentor expected to gain).

To learn how to work well together, partners compared their preferred mentoring styles, identified by answering the Mentoring Style Indicator, watched a video that demonstrates how to use all four mentoring styles, and then practiced resolving a challenging issue for which the protégé needed various types of mentoring assistance.
Developing different mentoring styles prevents partners from overly using a preferred style, which can be inappropriate and cause relationships to terminate. A study published in the book, Breaking the Glass Ceiling, for example, showed how self-reliant protégés often reject the mentor’s wise counsel even when it is necessary for success. In this study, 38% of the female proteges did this and saw their careers derailed when mentors stopped providing assistance.

The initial focus of the training session engaged partners in discussing important protégé goals, and creating a Mentoring Action Plan that converted talk into actions to achieve one key goal. Once the partners agreed on a plan, they worked to carry it out, preparing for meetings and getting together as scheduled via telephone or in person instead of simply “doing lunch” or meeting in other casual ways.

To ensure that objectives could be met over the long term, the 12 business unit representatives were taught to provide partner training for incoming groups of mentors and protégés. The administrator, meanwhile, continued to oversee the overall program and to help the representatives fulfill local coordinator tasks.

Because the three mentoring programs were carefully defined, designed, and delivered, they continued to produce intended outcomes for the next 10 years.