6 Common Challenges When Initiating a Mentoring Programme

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Mentoring is a highly beneficial and successful learning and development strategy for your business. But, as with most things that are worth doing, it is not without its challenges.

Whether it is planning your mentoring programme, matching mentors and mentees, or monitoring the success of the programme, you need to be prepared. It is essential to be aware of the challenges you may face, but more importantly, you need to know how to overcome them.

In this article, we will discuss six common challenges when initiating a mentoring programme and strategies to overcome these challenges.

Importance of Mentoring Programmes

Mentors provide learning opportunities, challenge us to grow and are a catalyst for personal and professional development. Mentoring programmes offer many benefits for both the participants and the organisation as a whole, such as:

• Leadership development
• Attract better talent
• Improved employee wellbeing
• Reduced employee turnover
• Increased employee engagement

In fact, according to LinkedIn, mentorship is ranked as the main focus area for learning and development programmes in 2023.

Common Challenges When Initiating a Mentorship Programme

Although mentorship programmes are clearly valuable, they are not without their challenges. Below, we will discuss six common challenges when initiating a mentoring programme.

1. Lack of clear objectives

As with any new project, you need to be clear on what you are trying to achieve by initiating a mentorship programme and why you want to do it. Without clear objectives, you will struggle to get buy-in from the participants and the rest of the organisation.

2. Insufficient planning

With mentorship, you may know what you want to achieve but don’t know how to get there. This is where you need a plan. Without proper planning, both your mentor and mentee will struggle.

3. Difficulty in mentor-mentee matching

Another challenge when it comes to mentoring programmes is the ability to effectively match mentors and mentees. Firstly, do you have enough willing participants? Will your programme be for 1-1 mentorship, or will one mentor be matched with several mentees? The decisions you make here will depend on your business and the objectives of the programme.

What’s more—once your matches are paired up, you may have to deal with clashing personalities or lack of commitment from one of the partners. The first step in being prepared for these eventualities is acknowledging that they may happen and having a plan in place.

4. Resistance to change

Change can be scary, and more often than not, employees resist going in a new direction. It is, therefore, quite likely that you will come up against some resistance when initiating a mentoring programme. Resistance to change can feel frustrating, but if you know to expect some resistance, you can be better prepared to deal with it.

5. Lack of training and support

You wouldn’t set up a new VoIP caller system without offering your employees some training and support. You should apply the same principle when setting up a mentoring programme. You ideally need to appoint someone who will be dedicated to managing the programme. This could be from within your organisation or even a dedicated new role.

If you don’t have a dedicated member of your team managing the programme, including the training and support of employees, you will come up against many challenges. If the participants do not receive adequate training or support, then the mentoring programme is likely to fail.

6. Ineffective programme assessment

With any new initiative in your business, it is important to think about how you will track its success and value. The assessment and reporting of your mentorship programme's success could be a challenge.

Ineffective programme assessment means you can’t accurately monitor its effectiveness. If you don’t know the effect it is having on the participants or your business as a whole, then you won’t be able to make improvements or make any sort of judgements on the programme at all.

Strategies to Overcome These Challenges

Now you understand some of the common challenges when initiating a mentoring programme, let’s look at some strategies to overcome them.

1. Setting clear objectives

To give your programme the best chance at success, you should first set clear objectives for the programme. Ask yourself why you are doing it and what you hope to achieve. Do you want to offer more leadership opportunities to your younger or newer employees? Do you want to give long-standing employees a new purpose and drive? Will the mentorship programme help you attract new talent to the organisation?

2. Comprehensive planning

Once you have set your objectives, you can begin the planning process. Before you launch a mentoring programme, you should have a comprehensive plan for what it will look like, what resources you will need, how you will get employees involved and how you will monitor it.

It can help to have resources such as mentoring agenda templates, secure communications software, and a dedicated member of staff overseeing the programme. Make sure you have all of these things in place before you launch.

3. Effective mentor-mentee matching

Depending on the size of your business and the style of your mentoring programme, there are different ways you can match up mentors and mentees. You may simply do this manually, or you could use an algorithm to find suitable pairings. What is important is that you do your research and find the most suitable method for you.

To effectively match mentors and mentees, you should consider:

• The objectives of your programme
• The goals of the mentee
• The experience and skills of mentors

Understanding these key elements, as well as establishing effective mentoring boundaries, will go a long way in ensuring the right matches are made, and you can minimise the number of clashes between mentors and mentees.

4. Managing learning resistance

In order to manage resistance to change, the first step is to involve your employees in the process as much as possible. Consult them on your plans and make sure they feel heard.

Secondly, make sure that employees see leadership getting behind the mentoring programme. When leaders are truly invested and supportive of these initiatives, employees are more likely to see value in them, too.

5. Providing training and support

As we previously mentioned, having a dedicated programme manager will be highly beneficial. This means that participants are more likely to receive adequate training and support and, therefore, increases the likelihood that your mentorship programme will achieve those objectives you set out at the start.

6. Evaluation and adaptation of methods

Tracking the success and areas for development of your mentoring programme can sound daunting. It is essential, however, that you take steps to do so. You need to understand what is going well, what needs to be developed, and the impact the programme is having on participants and the business overall.

This can help everyone understand the value and importance of the programme and is key to its continuing success. Understanding key metrics will also help you address any issues and adapt your methods quickly and effectively.

Final Thoughts

We have explored why mentorship is valuable to your organisation, as well as the challenges that you may face when initiating a mentoring programme. Challenges such as resistance to change and mismatching of mentees and mentors can seem overwhelming, but with proper planning and preparation, you can overcome them.

Author Bio

Alwayne Powell is an experienced performance marketing leader with an extensive background in the digital space, working client and agency side to provide paid search, SEO and CRO solutions in the B2B and B2C sectors. They are the current Senior Digital Marketing Manager at leading communication platform provider 8x8. You can find them on LinkedIn.