A successful workplace mentoring program starts with a clear goal, identifies the employees and skills it needs to support, matches the right mentors and mentees, and gives participants enough structure to succeed. From there, you’ll need to track participation, gather feedback, and adjust the program over time.
How to Start a Mentoring Program in 7 Steps
- Define the program’s goal
- Identify who will participate
- Choose your mentoring model
- Recruit and prepare mentors
- Match mentors and mentees
- Set expectations and launch
- Measure results and improve the program
What is a Workplace Mentoring Program?
A mentoring program is a flexible way to connect employees with colleagues who can help them build skills, navigate career decisions, and learn from real-world experience. Unlike a manager, a mentor typically doesn’t set goals, assign work, or oversee someone’s performance. Mentoring programs might be used to develop future leaders, build specific skills, or support a company-wide development initiative. Mentoring can also include coaching, but the two aren’t quite the same: employee coaching is a specific approach focused on asking the right questions, guiding conversations, and helping people find their own path forward.
What Are the Benefits of a Workplace Mentoring Program?
Managers can’t handle every aspect of employee development. Mentorship brings in other experienced people across the organization to share their skills and guidance. It benefits mentees, but it can be just as valuable for mentors to connect with other areas of the business and can even give aspiring managers a chance to build leadership experience before stepping into the role.
How Do You Build a Workplace Mentoring Program?
1) Decide What You Want Your Mentoring Program to Accomplish
Every mentoring program should start with clear objectives. They give mentors and mentees a shared sense of purpose, help keep conversations focused, and make it easier to measure whether the program is working. Some objectives might include:
- Build stronger manager and leadership skills
- Improve cross-functional collaboration by helping people understand how other teams work
- Build a stronger pipeline of talent for future roles and support succession planning
- Create more equitable opportunities for development and advancement across your organization
- Help employees build specific skills
- Drive engagement and build culture through those who embody your company’s values
2) Decide Who the Mentorship Program Is For
Your company may have a specific reason for starting a mentoring program, but sometimes employees are the ones who spark it into action. Or a manager might recommend a mentor who can help an employee develop in an area outside their own expertise. Mentorship can be a powerful way to give people a fresh perspective outside their immediate team, expose them to different career paths, or simply connect them with someone who’s been there before.
3) Choose Your Mentoring Model
The right mentoring model depends on what employees want to learn, who can support them, and how much time everyone can commit. One-on-one mentoring is ideal for personalized development, while group and peer mentoring can extend your program to more people. Reverse mentoring gives leaders a valuable opportunity to learn from more junior colleagues.
One-on-one mentoring
One-on-one mentoring pairs an employee with someone who can provide personalized guidance, feedback, and support. That might be a senior colleague who can help them prepare for their next role—or someone in another department who can introduce them to new skills and career paths.
This model works particularly well when the mentee has a specific development goal and both people can commit to meeting regularly.
Group mentoring
Group mentoring allows one mentor to support several employees at once. It’s a practical choice when experienced employees have limited time or when several people are working toward similar goals.
The group format also gives mentees the chance to learn from one another. They can discuss shared challenges, hear different perspectives, and build relationships across the organization—all without requiring the mentor to repeat the same conversation several times.
Peer mentoring
Mentors don’t always need to be more senior. Peer mentoring connects colleagues at similar levels who have different experiences, skills, or areas of expertise.
This model can be especially useful during onboarding, when a workplace “buddy” can help a new hire settle in. It can also support internal mobility by connecting employees with peers in different roles who can help them explore a possible career move.
Reverse mentoring
Reverse mentoring turns the traditional model around by giving a more junior employee the opportunity to mentor a senior leader. Junior employees might help leaders better understand emerging technology, generational perspectives, workplace culture, or diversity and inclusion. In return, employees gain exposure to senior leadership and the opportunity to make their voices heard.
4) How to Choose Your Mentors
You can start by identifying people who:
- Have relevant skills or experience
- Actually want to mentor
- Have time to commit
- Can listen and give useful feedback
- Are comfortable helping someone learn rather than simply telling them what to do
- Embody your culture and values
Being senior doesn't automatically make someone a good mentor. You want your mentees to commit to making the time and keeping the meetings in order for this to succeed.
5) How to Match Mentors
You can match mentors and mentees around a specific skill, career goal, development need, or company-wide initiative. Early in my career, when I was new to managing, I was paired with our head of sales. The goal was to learn from her experience, but I also had a goal to build a stronger relationship between marketing and sales. I hadn’t specifically asked for a mentor, but the pairing worked. I brought real challenges and questions to our conversations, and we worked through them together while I learned from an executive.
In Bridge, our skills management platform has built-in skills communities that connect mentors and mentees around the skills they want to develop. Structured one-on-one agendas also give them a starting point for those first few meetings, so there’s less of that awkward, “What should we talk about?” moment.
6) Give Mentors and Mentees Guidelines
As with any program, a little structure goes a long way. Even experienced managers may need some guidance when stepping into a mentoring role. Start by asking both people to create a short bio covering their experience and, most importantly, their skills. Then have them outline what they hope to get from the relationship and provide a few sample agendas to help guide those first conversations. After a few meetings, they’ll likely find their own rhythm.
HR should also set clear expectations around confidentiality and communication. Mentoring works best when people feel comfortable speaking openly, so mentors shouldn’t be expected to report everything back to a mentee’s manager. At the same time, there should be guidelines for situations where something comes up that needs to be escalated. Mentors can share general progress updates while keeping individual conversations private.
7) How to Measure the Success of Mentorship Program
Pay attention to whether the program is actually working. You don't need to overcomplicate it. Look at a few things:
- Ask participants. Are mentors and mentees finding the relationship useful? Are they meeting regularly? What's working, and what's getting in the way?
- Look at development. Are mentees building the skills or reaching the goals they joined the program to work on?
- Watch career growth. Are participants taking on new responsibilities, moving into new roles, or becoming more prepared for their next step? Keep in mind that mentoring is only one factor that can influence internal mobility.
- Ask managers. Do they see changes in the mentor's work and actions? Do they feel like it's helping?
Most importantly, don't wait until the end of the program to find out something isn't working. Check in along the way, make it easy for people to ask for a new match, and use what you learn to improve the next round.
How Often Should Mentors and Mentees Meet?
Once or twice a month is a good starting point, but consistency matters more than frequency. Give your participants an agenda outline for structure, and encourage mentees to bring real challenges to discuss so conversations don’t become one-sided. You could also offer mentor “office hours,” where employees—especially aspiring managers—can drop in to talk through a challenge. Just set boundaries so mentors don’t become the go-to for every question.
How Do You Keep a Mentoring Program Going?
Start by giving mentors and mentees enough support to make the relationship successful. Not every subject-matter expert naturally knows how to mentor, so give mentors resources, training, or conversation prompts to help them ask better questions, give useful feedback, and keep meetings productive. And don’t expect mentors to carry someone’s entire development plan; mentoring should work alongside learning, manager support, and other development opportunities.
A mentoring program shouldn’t be something you launch once and leave alone. The best programs evolve as your people, and the skills your organization needs, change.
Ready to Start a Mentorship Program?
Want to build a mentoring program that works for both mentors and mentees? Our ebook, 3 Elements of a Successful Mentorship Program, covers how to make strong matches, give people the right structure, and keep the program going over time.
