What Leaders Must Do to Ensure Mentoring Success

Mentoring is an organizational practice whose time has come. In today’s competitive business climate, the need for continuous learning has never been greater. At the same time, the hunger for human connection and relationships has never been more palpable. Because mentoring combines learning with the compelling human need for connection, individuals are better able to deepen their personal capacity and maintain organizational vitality in the face of continuous challenge and change.

Mentoring also is a smart way to do business. Organizations that continuously create value for mentoring achieve amazing results. They report increased retention rates, improved morale, increased organizational commitment and job satisfaction, accelerated leadership development, better succession planning, reduced stress, stronger and more cohesive teams, and heightened individual and organizational learning.

Leaders in organizations must be involved at the beginning of mentoring efforts and must continuously sustain their involvement over the long haul. Far too often, leaders “deputize” others to carry the mentoring banner for them. While this may seem necessary to ease busy schedules, it is insufficient to generate the kind of traction needed to keep the mentoring effort flourishing.

Leaders who sit outside the day-to-day operation of organizational mentoring nevertheless have a key role to play in ensuring mentoring success. They possess the political muscle, the organizational wherewithal and the clout to make things happen. Because of their positional power, what they say and do greatly influence the success or failure of organizational mentoring.

There are eight requirements for leaders who want to ensure sustainability of mentoring within their organizations:

1. Leaders must think more seriously and systemically about mentoring and create cultures to support and strengthen the mentoring that occurs within their organizations. This means being more strategic about mentoring by aligning all these programs with the organization’s vision and business goals. It also means building accountability into systems, maximizing communication, creating demand, promoting value visibility, offering multiple opportunities, making it available to everyone in the organization and building in safety nets to minimize stumbling blocks and address challenges.