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Are you wondering how to build a mentoring program for your employees? The truth is that mentoring in companies is really a brilliant way to improve your talent development and to spend your L&D budget - it gives each mentee an equal opportunity to maximize their potential while also being a personalized experience for each individual. If you’re currently looking at talent development best practices and need some inspiration on what to focus on, keep reading to learn about 3 examples of mentoring focus areas you can choose for your workplace.
Career development mentoring
Focus on talent development in your company! Mentoring is one of the talent development best practices that will give everyone the opportunity to fulfill their individual career needs and overcome their unique challenges. By matching each employee in the program with their own mentor, this becomes a highly personalized experience.
Mentees have the opportunity not only to level up in their hard skills, but also to focus on soft skills such as communication or presentation and public speaking, as well as deeper-rooted topics like self-confidence, overcoming imposter syndrome or achieving work-life balance.
Mentoring in leadership
Being a good leader isn’t easy, especially for someone in their first ever management role. Leadership requires a whole new set of skills which many don’t have the chance to acquire before actually stepping into their new role. That’s why leadership development is important and why you should invest in it.
Give your company’s managers an opportunity to grow by matching them for mentoring sessions with experienced leaders. To better illustrate how mentoring is valuable for leadership: mentors will provide your managers with a unique point of view by sharing their experiences from their own leadership career. Mentoring in leadership will help your employees to improve skills such as self-confidence, team management and culture, establishing a feedback culture, being an inclusive leader or dealing with difficult situations.
You can either opt for individual leadership mentoring, or enroll a whole group of managers in a specially designed leadership mentoring program combining 1:1 mentoring with group workshops and discussions.
Mentoring for women
Another track you can focus your mentoring on is giving growth opportunities to women or other members of underrepresented groups in your company. This can be an amazing boost for your D&I strategy! Even in the modern workplace, women still face a unique set of challenges and biases which can keep them from successfully climbing the career ladder. How mentoring helps women is through connecting them with mentors who will empower them and equip them with tools to fight these biases and overcome the challenges they face.
This kind of mentoring program is a great growth benefit for members of women’s ERGs (employee resource groups). If you have such a group within your organization, you should absolutely look into mentoring program options focused specifically on women. The benefits of female mentorship are absolutely worth the investment!
This was a rundown of 3 types of mentoring programs which will be great choices for your workplace. We highlighted how mentoring helps women, how mentoring is valuable to leadership and how you can use it to improve talent development in your company.
Whichever mentoring focus area you choose (or if you decide to design a completely different program altogether), you’re making a great choice! Greater employee satisfaction, engagement, productivity and retention are just some of the many benefits of mentoring in companies, and are precisely the reason why talent development is important. If you’d like to look into options for workplace mentoring, check out Femme Palette’s offer of employee mentoring programs!
