What If Millennials Ran Your Mentoring?

1. Add large, open mentoring programs to pre-existing small, targeted programs. Learning leaders don’t have to abandon the small, formal mentoring programs traditionally associated with high-potential development. However, to be effective in today’s business environment, they need to allow high potentials to have multiple mentors of their own choosing and allow them to mentor others as part of their experience. This builds the culture of mentoring as a shared, collaborative social responsibility in the organization, and it helps millennials engage in mentoring in the same way they want and need to accomplish their daily work: by collaborating with others across functions and locations. Further, if learning leaders don’t offer some kind of mentoring experience for all employees, millennials will see individuals’ exclusion from formal programs as a social justice issue in the organization, and they won’t be shy about sharing their opinions with their peers inside and outside the organization. To address this, leaders should create an open mentoring culture where people learn from each other in a wide variety of formal and informal relationships on an enterprise level. This allows everyone to reap the benefits of mentoring.

2. Use technology to make it easier to get started, connect with others and expand the mentoring experience. “The attraction of an open environment in mentoring is the vastness, but it can be scary because of that,” Brennan said. “People can get stuck on start. Some boomers struggle with the online aspect of mentoring and feel the personal touch is gone.” This does not mean all face-to-face mentoring relationships should be replaced with virtual ones, but it does mean organizations can begin using technology to help people forge new relationships across traditional boundaries in order to expand learning networks. Using technology to help people sign up and get connected can enhance the personal nature of the learning experience. Mentoring is people-centered learning — technology just makes it easier.