How You Can Start a Mentoring Program

Karen Salmansohn once said, “Choose to focus your time, energy, and conversation around people who inspire you, support you and help you to grow you into your happiest, strongest, wisest self.” But how does one find those special individuals that will support their growth and help them to enable positive change in their professional life?

If you’re an HR Manager, you most likely spend a large portion of your time ruminating on the idea of creating the perfect team that will both inspire and challenge one another. But some factors will always be out of your control. As much as your encourage or cajole, you cannot force senior employees to personally engage in the development of young high potentials in a truly impactful way. You can set as many one-on-ones as you want, but if the employee sitting in the senior position has no true passion to foster the development of the next generation then you’re out of luck.

And what if you’re an individual within a company without an active HR Manager? If your ambitions go beyond your current role, or if you’re searching for ways to be the best that you can be within your current role you may find it a challenge to receive actionable advice from your peers or superiors. Whether it’s a lack of time or a lack of interest, your search for a mentoring figure will be quickly ended.

At Menttium, we’re intimately familiar with the desire and drive to learn through a mentoring relationship. Whether you’re new to your industry or a seasoned veteran, there is always more to learn and new opportunities for personal and professional growth. But finding a way to access the wealth of knowledge accrued by your peers can prove a challenge to many. The same can be said for HR professionals who are trying to fully leverage their high potentials. How do you find a mentor for yourself or for your employees in today’s modern corporate climate?

Where to Find a Mentor

As an HR Manager or motivative individual, there are two ways you could go about finding a mentor and starting a mentoring program in your office. First, you could contact more senior members of your company and ask if they would be willing to enter into a mentoring relationship with yourself or a member of your staff. If you get lucky and your candidate says yes, you’ll then be tasked with creating assets and facilitating events to support the pair’s mentoring relationship. This can be an arduous undertaking for both an employee or an HR professional. Adding these responsibilities on top of your already full plate can put off even the most well-meaning individuals.

Your second option is to join forces with a seasoned mentoring facilitator. You can still have control over aspects of your mentoring program or experience, but you’ll be able to lean on a dependable and time-trusted partner to help facilitate the execution of your new mentoring relationship.

How to Approach Mentoring the Right Way

At Menttium, we believe in the power of mentoring. We know that the right mentor can accelerate learning, increase confidence, broaden perspectives and help key talent realize their true potential. Finding that perfect mentor is a task we take seriously. We don’t use algorithms or computers to find our mentees the perfect mentor, we use human emotion and experience to rigorously profile and match our corporate mentoring pairs.

When it comes to the question of “how to start a mentoring program,” we’ll be there to help you every step of the way. To better suit the needs of our mentors and mentees, we offer both cross-company and internal mentoring services.

Internal Mentoring from Menttium

Do you want to transfer cultural knowledge and foster an overall mentoring culture within your company? Are you looking to establish a mentoring program within your corporation using your existing internal talent? If so, our internal mentoring services may be right for your needs. With consulting, facilitation, and administrative support and guidance, our team of mentoring experts will work with you to craft the perfect mentoring program infrastructure for your business.

While many factors will go into the decision of whether or not your company is situated to support an internal mentoring program, one of the most prominent deciding factors will be whether you have a sufficient number of available mentors within your corporation. If you’re a smaller shop, then you may find that you just don’t have quite enough willing mentors to support an in-house mentoring program. If that is the case, then our cross-company mentoring model may be better suited to your needs.

Cross-Company Mentoring from Menttium

If you’re lacking the manpower in-house to justify an internal mentoring program, our cross-company corporate mentoring services may be better suited to your needs. Our cross-company mentoring is also an attractive proposition for individuals who are seeking mentoring opportunities.

Within our cross-company corporate mentoring program, world-class mentors with an average Menttium tenure of seven years build confidential relationships in a one-on-one setting to allow mentees to grow through outside perspective sharing and experience-back guidance. We join our mentor-mentee pairs through the work of skilled interviewers, not an algorithm. Our mentees have experienced a 95% match satisfaction rate over our nearly 30-years of operation, and in the rare 5% of matches where either side expresses dissatisfaction, action is taken immediately to ensure that both parties are experiencing the ultimate value of their relationship.

Are you Ready to Start a Mentoring Program?

When you began reading this article, you were most likely under the impression that if you wanted to start a mentoring program in your office or create a mentoring program in your group of peers, you would need to do it alone. But such is not the case. If you want to start a mentoring program, there’s no need to go it alone. At Menttium, we’re always available to talk about mentoring and how it can become a reality for those seeking high-quality mentoring experiences. Give us a call today to learn more about our mentoring offerings.