How To Get The Most Value Out Of Your Mentoring Programs
A recent study by global management consulting firm McKinsey provides quantitative insights into some of the reasons why people are quitting their jobs at record levels. Interestingly, their study found that, of the respondents who quit their jobs between April of 2021 and April of 2022, the number one reason was a lack of career development and advancement.
Mentoring has long been recognized as a powerful career development tool that can strengthen an employee’s sense of belonging and overall job satisfaction, and it has been shown to be particularly meaningful for women and people of color. While the value of mentoring in general is well accepted, the actual practice of creating and maintaining a strong mentoring program has proven challenging for many companies, especially during the pandemic, when face-to-face interactions became a rarity.
Often, even with the best of intentions, mentoring programs can falter or fail because of practical considerations and obstacles. Chief among them are two common challenges: (1) finding a good match between mentor and mentee; (2) managing the logistics.
The fact that most mentor programs are created and managed manually is often at the root of both of these challenges. A manual matching process can turn a mentoring program into a crapshoot, with the added disadvantage that, once a mentoring relationship is set up, it can take a really long time before it can be severed – often creating awkward situations for both mentor and mentee. Managing the logistics manually further exacerbates the problem, which can result in employees missing out on months, if not years, of potential career support, while the leaders feel that their efforts are being wasted. But even when a mentor-mentee match is good, mentoring programs that focus on one-on-one relationships can have limited value, as any given employee would benefit from having access to a range of mentors who can support them with different aspects of their careers.
The limited value of mentoring programs is also felt by senior leaders, who have the most potential for imparting their wisdom to the benefit of more junior colleagues. Their time is very valuable, and being able to mentor only a small number of people means that they are only able to have modest impact.
Lastly, mentoring programs that are managed manually are likely to miss out on the opportunity to provide quantitative evidence of their impact, which in turn could help to improve the program. The net result is that most mentoring programs struggle to scale and to generate tangible, measurable ROI.
These limitations are also particularly likely to have a negative impact on women, people of color and employees from other underrepresented groups, because manual matching and limited resources lead to the kinds of disparities that result when a seemingly unbiased process allows individual biases to creep in: even a slight, unconscious bias in a mentor’s decision of whom to mentor, when accumulated across the organization, can end up favoring mentees whose backgrounds most closely matches the backgrounds of the mentors, fostering greater homogeneity.
Given the value of mentoring in supporting career advancement, employee satisfaction and employee retention, there seems to be a great opportunity to improve the effectiveness and impact of mentoring programs, and to find ways of quantifying the ROI of mentoring so that companies can make better decisions on how to manage and scale these programs.
Sandra Babu-Boateng, co-founder and CEO of LegacyShift, personally experienced some of these issues during her corporate career, when she found herself unprepared to navigate corporate culture as a Black woman. Ultimately, not seeing a pathway to growth and success, Babu-Boateng left corporate America to become a serial entrepreneur. After successfully launching two companies, she recently found herself thinking about how technology could help people like herself and the companies who could benefit from a better way to create, manage and scale mentoring programs.
Babu-Boateng and her co-founder, Isaac Babu-Boateng, realized that mentoring can be seen as a market network that connects individuals with experts, and that, as with any network, technology can unlock value and drive efficiency. Based on this insight, they created LegacyShift, a B2B market network platform that matches members with internal experts for skills training, mentorship and career support.
The platform addresses all of the challenges mentioned earlier. In order to prevent poor matches and being stuck in long relationships, LegacyShift uses AI to match members with multiple experts, so that employees can find the best mentors, cultivate these connections on their own, and build relationships that are as deep or superficial as they want. LegacyShift also offers a suite of tools beyond profile creation and matching, including scheduling and video chats, to reduce dramatically the effort required to manage and execute all aspects of the mentoring program, especially now that remote work has become commonplace.
These features alone already unlock significant value, but a great added benefit of LegacyShift is that by leveraging its technology platform, companies can gain powerful, data-driven insights. Furthermore, senior leaders can expand their influence by creating videos to share their knowledge and expertise, which can then be shared much more broadly than would be possible with one-to-one relationships.
As companies struggle to attract and retain talent, LegacyShift is likely to become a leading contributor to the growth and success of mentoring programs, bringing tangible and intangible benefits not only to employees, but also to leaders and companies. At the same time, increasing the scale and effectiveness of mentoring programs will implicitly yield the greatest benefit for those who have historically had the least access to these programs, including women, people of color and underrepresented groups. Hence LegacyShift also has the potential to create more inclusive, diverse and equitable workplaces, yielding further benefits to companies and to society as a whole.
Read More