Innovating the Mentoring Experience

Mentoring is key in all professions. No matter what association you work for mentoring is important to your members. You join an association to be mentored. But what does mentoring actually look like? I would like to challenge everyone reading this post by saying mentoring is not a year-long, one-on-one relationship. It is part of the community.  As community professionals we need to look at how mentoring is changing and how community can meet mentoring goals. My association launched a mentoring program in January of 2019. It was part of a Board directed initiative to add member value. This was directed in October. We had two months to establish the program. Thankfully, I knew there was a desire for this initiative. I started doing research on effective mentoring programs in the summer. I found that mentoring programs are hard to do well. I looked at best practices, but I knew something had to change. We took a different approach. We got a lot of push back (and still do) from our retired, potential mentors. We started multiple conversations in the community about effective mentoring and asked members to offer feedback. When I met with them, they told me that a “match.com” format would not work. As someone that had done A LOT of online dating, I knew if this was going to be successful that is exactly what we needed to embrace. How our members viewed mentoring needed to change. The online dating experience is an how people are used to engaging. Changing the dynamic No one wants to embark on an assigned, year-long relationship. Members want to search and pick a mentor. They want to vet them first. There is a cadence with your interaction. Online dating is not that different from online mentoring. They want to have a few drinks, then have dinner, then commit to a relationship. No one wants to commit without getting to know the person. We need to understand the experience our members expect. No one wants to take advice from someone if they do not accept their values. Just like online dating. Who is the best mentor? The best mentor is not your retired lifetime members. It is the person who is five to ten years above the person asking to be mentored. They are relevant. No one wants a mentor that hasn’t experienced what they are asking advice about. As an example, the professional engineering licensure process has changed dramatically over the years. Someone who embarked on getting licensed in the 1980’s had a completely different experience than a college graduate today would expect. Members want someone a few years their senior – they are also less intimidating. From mentoring requests, we have seen that younger members are the most requested. I can’t tell you how many lifetime members never receive a request and are upset. You need to enable the younger members to mentor college students. They may not feel qualified, but they are the most qualified. Explain to them how relevant their experience is to a mentee. This is a great leadership opportunity for them that will help them grow. Let the members pick the platformA lot of our members think that mentoring must be a face-to-face interaction. We live in a virtual world. You do not need to meet with someone in person to gain valuable insight or build a relationship. Professionals do not have time to leave their office to meet with someone. Especially not early on in their career. If a relationship is goal-oriented (like it should be) a few emails, texts, or even facetiming is efficient and it saves time on travel. It is also more valuable than being in a mentoring relationship with someone in your office because you receive a more well-rounded perspective while providing other perspectives. We allow members to choose their own platform that suits their needs. Let them set their own termsEvery partnership has its own dynamic and goals. A program should provide recommendations on what makes a valuable partnership, but it should allow members to set their own goals, term length, and how often they meet. We provide a partnership policy for members to fill in the blanks. However, we do not dictate any of these elements that play a crucial role in how successful the partnership will be. The program should focus on communicating the importance of setting expectations not on the specifics of the expectations. Members want flexibility. What works for one partnership will not work for all of them. How does that work in community? Our mentoring program is powered by the Higher Logic Mentor Match module. It is an extension of the community. If we have unanswered questions in the community about a career related topic, I often search for mentors enrolled in the program that have selected that topic in the program and I ask them to answer the question. The enrolled mentors want to share their advice and expertise. They usually reply quickly. I look at our mentoring community/program as a subset of our larger community. I believe there is still more we can do to tap the potential here. We noticed that mentors and mentees who saw the value in mentoring and joined, are active in our community forums. There was a huge bump in our community platform because mentoring drove them there. There may be better platforms than Higher Logic for a mentoring program but integrating the community with mentoring was extremely beneficial. As someone who participates in other non-profits in leadership roles, integration is so important in the member experience. Mentoring in the futureLike other association models, the mentoring model needs to continue to shift and change with the times. It should be flexible, low commitment, and virtual. Mentoring is difficult, but community is the most capable of handling the challenges. I look forward to continuously improving the mentoring experience. I’m happy to talk offline for anyone interested in any of our association’s resources.