Services: Employee Mentor Programs

It is a clear business imperative for organizations to continue to build their “leadership pipeline”. With this in mind, more and more companies identify the need to encourage mentoring relationships across their organizations. Of course, the ideal scenario is that an organization is creating a climate that supports mentoring.

Tied to this, a well-executed formal mentoring program is a way to “jumpstart” the development of people and to ensure that key individuals with high potential are not lured away by your competitors. This is also a mechanism which can support the organization’s succession planning process by developing and coaching a diverse slate of internal candidates who are prepared to assume increasing levels of responsibility.

Mentor programs can be successfully approached from a variety of angles. One-to-one mentoring (when the mentor pairs are carefully matched or self-selected) can be powerful. Mentoring circles provide high impact for a number of people at once. Also, informal mentoring – when an organization provides guidelines and training but does not facilitate mentoring relationships per se – can be a way to empower folks to take ownership of their own development.

We believe that mentor programs will continue to be a commitment on the part of organizations that want to attract and retain top talent and want to facilitate successful knowledge transfer and cross-pollination of ideas within their organizations.