When one experienced leader commits to mentoring a future leader, the gains ripple across the whole company. Employees come awake to their opportunity for career development. Mentors enjoy reinvesting their experience. And the organization positions itself for sustainable growth and healthy succession planning.
I have been fortunate to have some great mentors during my career. One was a man named Frank. He made such a big impact on me and my family business that I wrote a book about the lessons learned, called Being Frank – Real Life Lessons to Grow Your Business and Yourself.
What about you? How could you harness the power of leadership mentoring in your company? Will the effort to create such a program even be worth it? Read on to find out.
Why Leadership Mentoring Packs Power
If your organization struggles to attract, retain, and develop top talent, mentoring may just be your solution. Mentorship visibly demonstrates how much you value empowering your people while strengthening your company.
It also enhances your knowledge sharing: Mentees gain wisdom from mentors’ experience, and mentors benefit from mentees’ fresh insights. In my own experience, mentoring can be very rewarding for the mentor as it provides an opportunity to share years of accumulated knowledge and wisdom.
On top of all that, mentoring strengthens your succession planning, as the leaders you will need tomorrow start developing today.
Mentorship boosts retention
Tomorrow’s leaders from among the Millennials and Gen Z avidly seek jobs with clear opportunities for career development. Offering mentorships positions your company to attract these growth-fueling A-Players. Studies show that when mentored, workers from these demographics are 21-23% more likely to report being satisfied with their current job than their non-mentored peers.
Consider, too, that one study reported retention rates as high as 72% for mentees and 69% for mentors—a double win. Thus, a mentorship program reaps dividends both in maintaining a strong leadership team now and in preparing those who will fill their shoes in the future.
Mentoring fosters a growth mindset
Further, companies where mentors honestly discuss their own successes and failures create an atmosphere of psychological safety, where future leaders can dare to experiment and innovate. In short, they welcome developing leaders to explore the frontiers, beyond comfort zones and the status quo, at the cutting edge where real growth happens.
In my car dealership business we encouraged department managers to mentor and nurture their Number 2 as part of their leadership role in the business. We found that everyone learned something in the process.
Mentored teams sustain profitability
Forbes reported that even during recent downturns, companies with mentoring in place achieved profits 18% higher than average. Part of the gain here might be attributed to greater retention of a satisfied workforce, reducing costs related to hiring and training new workers.
Mentored leaders strengthen succession planning
With a loyal, empowered workforce, stocking the leadership pipeline becomes a more straightforward task of matching strengths to roles.
With only 35% of US businesses having a succession plan in place, this can be a significant competitive advantage.
Mentoring relationships are ideal environments in which to recognize the gifts of future leaders and to encourage their growth. Observed weaknesses can be addressed and emotional intelligence and interpersonal leadership skills nurtured. The mentee also gains a clearer view of the organization’s culture, operations, and business goals—along with a greater desire to stay around to see all that bear fruit.
Then, when leadership roles open up, mentored individuals stand ready, prepared to address challenges, leverage their leadership skills, inspire others, and achieve organizational goals.
What Mentorship Participants Gain
So far, we’ve primarily looked at how the organization benefits from offering a mentorship program. But the process is also a win-win for both mentors and mentees.
For mentees, their professional growth gets a boost in many ways, including:
- Quick access to the kinds of knowledge, experience, and insights that would normally take years to acquire
- Accelerated growth in soft skills like team-building, interpersonal communication, problem-solving, empathy, and adaptability
- Improved self-awareness
- Expanded networking, as they’re invited into their mentors’ circles
- Confidence in making decisions, surmounting obstacles, and handling career transitions
- Deeper industry understanding
Mentors, too, receive benefits, such as the following:
- Satisfaction in seeing their expertise propel the next generation toward success
- Opportunities to give back to an organization they value
- Refined coaching skills
- New perspectives from a younger colleague—maybe even insights on newer technologies
With perks like these, anyone with some time and seniority might want to jump aboard the mentorship train. However, the best mentorships happen when both participants are well-suited to the task. So, let’s consider how to recognize qualified mentors.
Who Makes a Good Mentor
Merely having leadership experience does not automatically equip a person to mentor. The role of a mentor is to guide, coach, encourage, and inspire a future leader. This calls for a specific set of strengths.
Qualified mentors should:
- Care about the success of the next generation as well as the business; be willing to invest their time in others
- Listen well: serve as non-judgmental and approachable confidant for mentee’s concerns and fears; share pertinent experience, not just advice
- Provide valuable feedback and hold others accountable for their own progress
- Exhibit humility: discuss their own successes and failures with honesty
- Model leadership: understand that “more is caught than taught.”
- Learn throughout life
- Direct people into activities that will stretch and develop their abilities
- Build a network
Who Makes a Good Mentee
Similarly, a mentee worthy of a mentor’s investment of time and energy will have qualities like these:
- Curiosity: asks good questions; seeks to understand processes, concepts, industry trends
- Eagerness to learn
- Openness: willing to try new things, hear new perspectives, and explore new approaches
- Humility: accepting correction and maintaining accountability
- Initiative: will take on new challenges for the sake of growth
If you can already think of several people who fit these descriptions, it’s time to examine the practical steps you can take to create a working leadership mentoring program for your own organization.
How to Create a Viable Leadership Mentoring Program
Like any successful initiative you launch, creating a mentoring program will require thoughtful construction, appropriate support, selection of resources, and promotion.
Communicate its Value
Begin early to broadcast the value of a leadership mentoring program. Build enthusiasm even while you build the program. Keep the upcoming program desirable and front-of-mind. If there are leaders within your organization who have been or are being mentored, share their success stories.
Develop your mentoring process
Begin with clear desired outcomes. Your leadership development goals will be the compass points around which you build your program.
Next determine your metrics of success. What will success look like? How will you monitor the program’s effectiveness during and after execution?
Document the competencies that determine eligibility to participate. Approach this in the same way as you would build out the competencies in a job scorecard when hiring a new employee. Develop an application that will help match mentees’ career goals to mentors’ expertise.
Require mutual commitment from your mentors and mentees. Guide them to set a schedule for their meetings and to come prepared for next steps each time.
Provide support throughout the process. Establish a protocol for addressing conflicts between mentors and mentees. Make space—both literal room space and schedule space—for mentorship meetings.
Provide a wide range of learning opportunities for mentees to experience.
Explore existing programs to find the right fit
Several good leadership mentoring program packages exist today. With your desired outcomes in mind, you can investigate those to find one that aligns best with your organization and its goals for mentoring.
At this point, your mentorship promotion can become far more specific about the program tools and how the process will look. Finally, it’s time to bring in the people who will make it happen.
Recruit mentors and mentees
Reach out to those who have expressed interest and who are already exhibiting leadership potential. Strive to match each mentor’s strengths to the areas in which their mentee desires to grow. Generally speaking, same-gender mentorship pairings tend to be most effective.
Provide training for your mentors and let them get to work.
Evaluate and celebrate
Once the first participants have completed the program, collect their feedback to evaluate the effectiveness of the present design. Adjust as needed.
Finally, celebrate the successes. Feed the success stories back into your promotion for next time. Point out where new leadership skills were developed, or which organizational achievements directly resulted from the work of these mentor/mentee partnerships.
All in Favor of Leadership Development?
Leadership mentoring can be a powerful means of developing loyal future leaders, strengthening the leaders already in place, and ensuring your succession planning is backed by a strong pipeline of leadership talent.
For more ideas on developing sustainably strong leadership within your organization, reach out to me here. I enjoy helping businesses grow through strategic decision making and strong succession planning.
