Mentoring is a special kind of developmental relationship in which learning occurs on a broad range of topics from professional to personal and which includes a deep seated caring for each other.
Many confuse supervision with mentoring; supervision is not necessarily mentoring in the true sense. Lack of clarity around the science of mentoring has degraded the quality of mentoring programmes.
The following steps will help you design a mentoring programme for your team or organisation.
* The first step is to define the goals of the programme; fuzzy objectives will lead to fuzzy results.
Most of the organisations target improvements in efficiency and effectiveness as key results. The most common goals of mentoring programmes include developing young talent for competing in the market, socialising young talent to company culture, developing leadership skills in the organisation.
* While mentoring has been shown to have positive effects for both mentor and protégé, it is important to zero down on the target population and after that tailor the programme accordingly.
Not everyone is ready for mentoring and should not be forced into the programme by the organisation.
* A well-designed mentoring programme would include training for the protégés and mentors before the programme starts.
In addition to being an expert on their domain, the mentors need to be aware of and skilled in giving and receiving feedback, understanding career alternatives, managing emotions, and using different learning styles with protégés.
Many mentors exhibit an unwillingness to learn, and you need to be extremely careful that this trait does not get passed on the protégés during the program unintentionally.
* Many mentoring programmes fail in the running phase.
When the mentors push their mentoring responsibilities lower in the priority stack and miss deadlines, push back commitments and even ignore their mentoring responsibilities and obligations altogether, the programme is all set to fail.
In case the mentors fail to measure up to the programme, additional training must be provided to them so that the protégés do not suffer due to mentor’s skill deficiency.
Courtesy: www.humanresourcesblog.com
