What are Your Goals for Mentoring

Prior to beginning to develop the plan for your in-house mentoring program, spend a bit of time developing the strategy for the program. The goal is to develop a program that makes sense for your organization and the people you are trying to support with mentoring. Often organizations roll out a mentoring program without consideration of what they are trying to accomplish by having a mentoring program. When I asked one client why they were interested in launching a mentoring program, the response was “Because our competitor has one and we should too.” I’m not saying the client shouldn’t have a mentoring program, but they need a good business case for one and not simply because they competitor has one.

Consider the answers to these questions listed below in order to develop your strategy for a mentoring program and thereby ensure you develop a program that works to meet organizational goals.

What challenges or issues are being faced within the organization that mentoring may be able to address?Which individuals would be suited to participate in a mentoring program – either as a mentor or the mentee? What is the ideal profile of a mentor? What is the ideal profile of a mentee?What is the experience with mentoring within the organization?What is the expected outcome or changes from a mentoring program? What is it expected that mentees will do better as a result of being mentored?How would a mentoring program link to the organization’s strategic long-term goals?

As a best practice, get the leaders of the organization together for a strategy session to respond to these questions. For a few clients, I do well when I send the questions out beforehand and then we discuss as a group –it gives them time to process and think. For yet others, I do better when we meet and talk through the questions as the connversation is lively and everyone participates and shares freely.

Align Training Plans to Organizational Goals

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
 By Gina Abudi, on January 15th, 2014

I was speaking with a client at the end of 2013 who was working on finalizing training plans for 2014. He stated that there appeared to be so many training needs and desires based on a recent employee engagement survey that he just didn’t know where to start! He had a limited budget but wanted to satisfy as many people as possible. He asked my advice on what would be most important to cover in training based on my knowledge of the organization. I asked him what the organization’s goals were for 2014 and beyond. He listed a number of goals that were discussed at a mid-year strategy session. And there was our starting point I told him!

As a best practice, align training needs to what is required to meet organizational goals. This provides a number of benefits, including:

Making a better business case for training investmentEnsuring employees are equipped to help the organization meet goalsProviding employees skills they will need for the futureEnabling the organization to better meet long term goals by ensuring employees have the skills and knowledge to do what needs to be doneEngaging executives and leaders in training (since by investing in training of employees, they will be able to meet their goals)

In order to align training needs to organizational goals, you will need an understanding of the long-term goals of the organization and will need to understand what is required to reach those goals. For example, in my client’s case, the organization is a pharmaceutical organization that has expanded significantly in the last year and half; more than doubling their employees and they expected to grow over the next few years. Additionally, they were moving from research to product development, an area in which they had not worked prior. Two needs were identified as essential:

The ability for individuals to take on management roles within the organizationThe ability for individuals to manage projects with tight deadlines

This prompted my client to look at the following skills and levels of competency:

Supervisory skills (many of those who would be moving to management roles were scientists and researchers.)Project management skills (a disciplined approach to managing product development projects would be essential in the future.)

Based on this research, he would be able to develop comprehensive training programs to help the organization meet their goals.

To summarize, as a best practice human resources and other training professionals should be meeting with executives and other leaders to understand strategic goals – at the organizational level but also strategy for each division or business unit. Use this information to develop a listing of necessary skills and knowledge that will be needed within the workforce to help achieve those goals. Determine whether those skills and that knowledge curently exists within the workforce and if it does, at what level (beginner, intermediate, advanced). Build your training plans based on getting employees the skills and knowledge needed to be successful. Certainly you may need to recruit new hires with special skills for some roles, but build up the skills of your current employees when possible. These individuals already have the institutional knowledge and understanding of the culture and bring much to the organization.

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