If your company's in-house mentoring program is failing, try this instead.
You’ve launched a mentoring program in your business. Congrats! Through the first few months of check-ins, you discover that your pairings are meeting together.
Then, after three months, you notice the enthusiasm has waned a little.
Meetings become less frequent. Business priorities take over.
If you’re in this situation, don’t be alarmed.
It’s what I prescribe as Mentor Fade.
Psst! You can keep reading, or watch the video recap here:
Having created and rolled out mentoring program for organisations in the past, and playing both roles (mentor/mentee), here are four reasons why mentor fade exists:
Not enough mentors: There simply aren’t enough mentors to match with all of those high potential people in your business
Time: Mentors in your business are chosen because they’re high performing. For that reason, they’re also in-demand.
Mentees get what they need in the first three months: Most mentoring programs have a set time period, for example, six months. As a mentee, after the first couple of sessions, I learnt a lot about what made my mentor successful. I didn’t really need another four months of conversation. I felt like I was wasting their time.
Power imbalance/status: I remember having a mentor that I desperately wanted to impress. I felt an immense amount of pressure to come along to the agreed-upon meetings, with some “smart questions” up my sleeve - not the real question I wanted answered
I was listening to Jenny Blake’s Pivot podcast a few years ago when I heard her use the phrase, friendtoring. A watershed moment!
For the uninitiated, friendtoring is a mutual mentoring relationship among peers. Early in my career, I had two friendtors who helped me tremendously. We navigated ourselves through a quarter-life crisis through our monthly brunch catch-ups across Brisbane (thank you, Jason Latimer and Camilla Roberts)!
I thought, if this worked so well for me outside of work, why wouldn’t it work within the workplace?
The distinction between friendtoring and mentoring
We go to our work friends when we need to celebrate and commiserate about our personal and professional lives. In the absence of that outlet, work can seem lonely and isolating. It lacks attachments.
Friendtoring provides an opportunity for connections to be made within your business, no matter someone’s role, or location, which makes it the ideal initiative particularly if you have remote workers.
While mentoring provides a great platform for specific expertise and career growth (“How did you become a Principal Engineer?” and “Which associations should I join?”) the focus on a friendtor relationship is mutual support, accountability and to build connections (“How did you go with reaching out to Bob?”, “Who can I talk to in the business to get x done?”, “Hey Jane, here’s a great podcast episode you should listen to…”)
Friendtoring advantages:
For your employees:
It’s mutually beneficial. Peers meeting together and offering reciprocal value.
Both parties learn and also coach/teach, there’s no weight on one person to be the expert and answer all of the questions.
Inclusivity: Everyone in your business can participate. There are far more possible peer-to-peer relationships in an organisation, than mentor (junior to senior) relationships.
For your business:
Did you know that having a best friend at work leads to better performance?
Gallup includes this item (“I have a best friend at work”) in their employee engagement survey because it links to improved business outcomes.
Their employee engagement database shows that only two out of 10 U.S. employees strongly agree they have a best friend at work. Yet, by moving that ratio to six in 10, organisations could realize:
36% fewer safety incidents
7% more engaged customers
12% higher profit
Here’s some of the reasons that strong friendships and connections enables those results:
An increase in collaboration across regions and functions
Employees attribute their connections and relationships to being part of your organization which inspires company loyalty
Rapid personal and professional growth for the individuals involved.
Friendtoring and mentoring aren’t mutually exclusive and can co-exist in a complementary way. You can roll these programs out formally, or more organically by providing resources on how any employee can start up their own friendtor network.
This initiative doesn’t need to be HR lead or formalised, but I recommend specific guidelines for my clients (such as setting up friendtor rituals, when to launch a friendtor program, etc) for successful implementation.
Here are some tips to get started:
Try it for yourself. Reach out to a peer and ask them to join you for a 30:30. A 30:30 is an hour-long conversation where you can pick a friendtor’s brain for 30 mins on a topic, and then you switch roles, and you help them tackle a topic.
Ramp it up for remote workers: These relationships are critical, particularly when some of your employees aren’t getting regular face-time.
Incorporate asynchronous technology: Friendtoring can be more effective using chat forums and voice notes, as opposed to adding more meetings in the calendar.
All the best seeking out your friendtors!
Connect and let me know how you go.