Starting a Mentorship Program from Scratch
How to build a proper mentorship setup to foster meaningful relationships
What is Mentoring?
Before anything, it is important to define what is meant by “Mentor” in the professional world. At tb.lx, we define a Mentor as someone who pays particular attention to our development and progress, believes in us even when we don’t, and doesn’t compete with us but takes pride in seeing us strive.
“A Mentor is the person that has a sense of where you can go when you don’t have the map yet” — Esther Perel
There is Mentorship everywhere. You probably have had people in your life who acted as Mentors, and you might have been considered as a Mentor by others, even if the relationship might not have been labeled as such.
In companies, Mentorship occurs in many informal, organic ways. Therefore, the objective of a formal Mentorship Program is certainly not to replace those informal Mentorships — but rather to give a structure and support for the creation of even more meaningful mentoring relationships in your company. If successful, a Mentorship Program will help create more connectedness between employees, leveraging your experienced employees and supporting your people’s growth.
Our Mentorship Program at tb.lx
A year ago, we started a Mentorship Program from scratch. At the time, we felt a strong need to multiply our experienced employees while giving our more junior ones the proper support and guidance for their growth. The program started with 6 Mentors and 6 Mentees. Fast-forward to today, we have 30+ people “enrolled” as formal Mentors and Mentees — meaning that about half of our company is actively involved in the Mentorship Program.
This is what a typical Mentoring Cycle looks like at tb.lx:
As you can see on the image, both the Mentee and the Mentor are actively working on themselves throughout the cycle — each in their own way. The Mentee focuses more on their personal development (by studying, learning on the job, taking on challenges outside their comfort zone), while the Mentor focuses on how they can improve in their role. Besides, the Mentor also provides guidance when needed on the day-to-day. They will regularly meet to touch base on the Mentee’s progress, learnings, and struggles.
Note that the Mentor-Mentee relationship is very unique, and how it will look in practice will be determined by many factors like personality, individual needs, and context. So rather than making it a rigid format that will constrain our target audience on how they should approach Mentorship, we try to bring it up more as a suggestion of all the ways one can possibly mentor someone.
Starting your own Mentorship Program
Step 1: Pairing up the Mentors & Mentees
The best way to be successful is to involve people who want to be there voluntarily. First, you need to assess who would benefit from such guidance and who has the potential to be providing it. This can be done by promoting the program internally and inviting people to reach out. We also explore this during touchpoints with employees and personal growth talks.
How do you make sure you are pairing the right people? The best way is to ask your direct audience. When people ask to join the program, we ask them if they have someone in mind already they would like to mentor or be mentored by. If this is not clear to them, we try to figure that out and play cupids, thinking of people who would match their personalities, interests, skills, background.
Step 2: Ramping up the Mentors
Mentoring requires many soft skills: active listening, empathetic communication, feedback-seeking and -giving, etc. For some people, this might be a totally new experience. That’s why it’s essential that you take your new Mentors by their hand, especially in the beginning.
We ramp up new Mentors as follows: First, we share helpful resources with our Mentors so they can educate themselves on the topic and our program. Through research and talking with experienced employees, we gathered, synthesized, and customized some information they could reflect on and digest.
Here are some examples of the materials we share with our new Mentors:
- What is a Mentor, and What it isn't (tb.lx documentation)
- How you can mentor in Practice (tb.lx documentation)
- Asking Powerful Questions in 1:1s (sample questions)
- Setting a Training Plan (article)
- How a Great Mentor Makes All the Difference (video)
We give our soon-to-be Mentors some time to dive into the topic. Once they are ready, we organize a touchpoint to answer their potential doubts, align expectations and agree on the next steps.
Step 3: Creating a Support System
It’s important to create moments where the Mentors and the Mentees have the opportunity to reflect and share, individually and within their peer group. At tb.lx we introduced these touchpoints:
- Meetups: we host a quarterly touchpoint called Mentors Meetup where our Mentors have the opportunity to gather together and bring anything to the table — personal challenges, learnings, or goals they had throughout the Mentorship. We also host a quarterly Mentees Meetup.
- 1:1s with HR: We make ourselves available to provide a safe space where anyone can talk about their potential struggles or challenges in the context of the Mentoring relationship. For more severe flag-raising, we do our best to address issues on the spot, but if the pairing simply doesn’t work out, we will unpair the Mentorship. And that’s okay.
Step 4: Measuring, learning & improving
We recommend running a half-year survey for Mentees to measure success and ask for recommendations for improvement. The goal is to learn from your main target audience (the Mentees) by giving them a voice.
Through our survey, we gained very valuable insights that helped us improve the experience for our Mentees. To the statement “I feel like I am growing with the Mentorship Program”, they strongly agreed (average score of 9/10). This confirmed to us we were on the right path. But we also learned how we could improve. To the question “What would make the mentoring experience better for you?”, we noticed two improvement points: some Mentees mentioned they would like to have more frequent touchpoints with their Mentor, so we shared that feedback with the respective Mentor. Some Mentees also asked for more interactions between the Mentees. That’s how we implemented the Mentees Meetup.
Step 5: Wrapping up and preparing the next cycle
We don’t have a fixed duration for a pair in the Mentorship Program. We tell our Mentors and Mentees that it will end when they feel there’s no need for a formal relationship to continue — be it after 6 months or 24 months.
The program might be over, but — if we’re successful in what we are trying to achieve — the Mentorship will organically continue and evolve more informally. Hopefully, the relationships built are strong enough that they will perdure in time and that the Mentee will always see their Mentor as a person they can reach out to when they need an attentive ear to vent, advice, or a fresh perspective.
And the ending of one mentorship program also means the start of the next one, with new and old faces. Some mentees might step up as mentors in future cycles, some mentors might have found their calling and continue to mentor more people, new colleagues might feel inspired to start the mentoring journey and join the program !
