Mentor Education: Start before the start

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Preparing people for mentoring is a three-part process of education, training and development.

1. Education – what mentoring is, why it’s important, how your program will operate
2. Training – what to do as a mentor or mentoree and how to do it
3. Development – strengthening specific skills and techniques

Before your mentoring program even begins, you need to start your education of potential participants as well as those indirectly involved. Start before the start because you want to:

• Generate attention and interest
• Gain support, and
• Attract participants and advocates

Prior to the launch of your program you’ll emphasize the “why” of mentoring – why is it necessary, its purpose, what problems will it fix, what are the benefits and advantages? In an organization you’ll be making the business case for mentoring, talking strategic outcomes; at a personal level you need to focus on more individual motivation.

Education is key to the communication strategy that promotes your mentoring program. You want to inform and inspire people, so you need to:

1. Collect facts and data
2. Create meaningful messages, and
3. Deliver them via multiple media

This means doing some research and picking out information relevant to your organization and people. Then crafting the most important messages you want to communicate about mentoring into various delivery modes – written, spoken, visual, live, recorded, then get them out to your world.

I’ll be talking more about this in our next live webinar. It’s called: How To Train Your Mentors and Mentorees but it’s about a lot more than mentoring workshops. Details and registration here.