Technical Mentorship (3/3): How Can Companies Foster a Mentoring Culture?
It’s important for companies to nurture the mentorship culture in their organization. It will help the company to keep the best people around and stay relevant in the market. The mentorship culture also can benefit companies by enabling smooth leadership succession.
As we have discussed in the previous articles (part 1 and part 2), mentoring is more about company culture rather than company policy. However, there are some areas that the company can do to foster a mentoring culture.
Formalizing the cultural initiatives
Some initiatives like knowledge sharing sessions and 1:1 sessions can be adopted as an official company event. This way, leaders can encourage people to participate. Other initiatives like code review and effective meetings can also be adopted as a standard operational procedure in the organization.
Incorporating mentorship into the performance appraisal
Incentives, both tangible and intangible, can be motivating. One way to incentivize mentoring-related activities is by incorporating them into the performance appraisal. When evaluating performance, consider evaluation aspect such as:
- The employee’s impact on leveraging a team’s knowledge.
- The employee’s intention to always raise the bar with a better way of doing things.
- The employee’s contribution as a mentor, speaker, or writer in technical learning forums.
Hire cultural-fit candidates
It needs to be understood that mentorship is not a solution for bad hiring. Hence, companies need to be more careful in hiring people to ensure that only culture-fit candidates are brought on board. Culture-fit means that the person’s beliefs and behaviors align with the company’s core values.
Support with learning materials
Somewhere along the learning process, an employee might need to learn a particular technical skill intensively. For this area, companies can give support by providing access to online courses, provide books, or certifications.
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This is the final part of a 3-part article series about technical mentorship. Read the first part here and the second part here. Stay tuned at our LinkedIn or Medium for more articles.
