Feedback from your mentee is very important to developing the relationship. Source: Freedigitalphotos.net

I’ve talked about the impact that a mentoring program within your organization can have, and I’ve shared some of the key benefits of such a program, including building employee loyalty, encouraging growth, and attracting high caliber employees. In order to put a successful program in place, you have to know how to measure how your mentorship program is performing. For this reason, I wanted to share some helpful tips for how to evaluate a mentorship program:

• Before starting your mentorship program, determine what you hope to accomplish through the program. For example, if you are a sales organization, perhaps your goal is to have all mentees within the top quartile of sales performance rankings within one year of implementing the program.
• Outline all of the elements that will be comprised in your organization’s mentorship program in order for it to be successful and refer to this regularly. It’s also a good idea to share this information with your organization’s mentees as well so that expectations are clear.
• Establish clear and realistic goals on a monthly or quarterly basis and regularly check to see how the program is performing in relation to these goals.
• Ask for feedback from the mentees, mentors, and perhaps other mentoring programs within your community. Sometimes you need constructive criticism to offer a better program for your organization.

To learn more about how to evaluate a mentorship program, please contact us at the Over My Shoulder Foundation. We are passionate about the art of mentorology and can share some best practices from other successful mentorship programs.