• Energetic yet inexperienced employee who shows promise but lacks discipline
• Long time company employee who has withdrawn from the company culture
• Company superstar who performs at a very high level with little regard for company policies

These are the types of employees that will benefit greatly from the mentoring process as the mentor or the mentee. The key to mentoring is to unlock the unique experiences of each individual to increase the combined experience of your people. The employee builds personal equity and improves personal morale. The business improves because employees begin to communicate on a more productive level and begin to see the workplace as a source of value beyond the paycheck.

1. What not to do. The most important thing to remember is to not overlap a mentor relationship with a supervisory relationship. That is a mentoring relationship should not be established with a direct report. Asking an employee to take on both roles will ultimately sabotage the ability to conduct one or both tasks successfully.

2. Kick off the program. The most important aspect of the mentoring program launch is to understand that we are asking employees to take time out of their schedules to seek and give advice on a routine basis. Some staff members may be reluctant initially. I would strongly advise you to conduct a survey of your people. Ask them how they would benefit from participating as a mentor or a mentee. Determine the amount of time they would be willing to devote to the process, what they would hope to gain, who they feel could benefit from their help or help them during the process, and with whom they would not want to interact. Any response is a good response. Go forward from the survey to develop goals of the program that take your people’s responses to heart.

3. Do some matchmaking. The program should be bottom driven from those seeking the mentor relationship. However, you will need to pay close attention to the surveys to determine the best fit between mentor and mentee. Once the program is established, you can allow new hires to choose from a number of possible mentors. In the beginning, you will need to exercise a little control to determine where the best matchups exist.

4. Educate and develop structure. The mentoring process may be new to many of your employees. You need to let them know what is expected of those who participate. For the mentors, expect the mentor to be available for a monthly meeting of an hour or more and weekly calls if necessary. You expect them to take a personal interest in the development of the mentee and be mentally available when called upon. For the mentee, expect them to

be honest about the challenges that they are facing and the roadblocks that they face. You want them to assume the responsibility for setting meetings. You want them to clearly define what they are hoping to learn from the mentor.

5. Provide suggestions to get started. Don’t be afraid to develop discussion topics that can be used to get the dialogue started. The idea here is to reduce the awkward silence that many of these first meetings hold. Suggest that they openly discuss their biggest dreams, hobbies, successes or failures to break the ice and then move into more substantive business issues that the employees face.

6. Stay connected. You should stay connected to the success of the program but not connected to the details of the discussions that occur. You should gauge success with semi-annual, anonymous surveys. Refrain from injecting yourself into the details of any mentor or mentee relationship unless you have reason to believe the relationship might violate company policy.

In the first few months of the mentoring program, don’t be surprised if your moments of frustration outweigh those of satisfaction. However, as your people buy into what you are doing, your culture will begin to take on one of teamwork and openness, with both mentor and mentee benefiting from their relationships.