Caveat: I know that my position on this is somewhat biased given what we do at Triple Creek.  But hey, this is a blog and I’m entitled to be opinionated, right?

The above stated and out of the way, even when I do my best to be objective, the stories that I still hear around how much time some organizations put into running mentoring programs continue to amaze me.  Even with the availability of technology solutions like Open Mentoring, many organizations still employ an antiquated process, one that often involves using spreadsheets and requiring committees to meet for hours upon hours (if not days upon days) to decide who should be matched with whom.  Admittedly, this process did make sense at one point in time: about 30 years ago when formalized mentoring first got off the ground in many organizations.

In case my implication was not clear enough, the problem is that this manual approach is a process that is 30 years old!  From where I sit, I still see many organizations striving to maintain entirely too much control over the connection process.  And quite frankly, as someone who appreciates efficiency and productivity, it’s downright maddening.

We need to remember that we are talking about adults.  While adult learners can certainly benefit from the feedback of others and incorporate it into their development plans, they are still most often in the best position to identify what it is they need to learn and subsequently who to connect with.  They don’t need someone to make the match.  What they need is a way to have broad access to the knowledge resources of the organization, since in most midsize to large organizations, they don’t personally know the vast majority of people who can provide the advice and expertise they need (and it’s not like some administrator making a manual match knows everyone either!)

If you want to be successful with mentoring in your organization in 2011 (and into the foreseeable future), here are the steps to take:

1. Adopt a technology-based solution that is focused on competency-based, intentional learning (and make sure it’s not social networking).  I’m not suggesting that having a social networking solution is bad (although we have had some of our clients tell us of how they have shut some of these solutions down due to mischievous behavior on the part of some in the workforce).  I’m simply saying that you cannot expect social networking to deliver results around competency-based, intentional learning.
2. Open the process up to the entirety of the organization.  Don’t limit participation to the traditional populations (e.g., HIPO Development, Succession Planning).  Feel free to run those traditional programs as well, but if that is all that you are doing with mentoring, you are old school (and not in the cool, retro sort of way).
3. Shift the time commitment on the part of the people running mentoring from activities focused on matching to promotion of the program.  A common story from our clients is one that looks like this: “I used to spend a majority of my time running a mentoring program for 300 people.  I had to collect surveys from the protégés and mentors around interest and expertise, and then I had to figure out how to match pairs.  I also had to answer questions along the way and encourage people to stay engaged.  At the end of the relationship, I would collect and compile evaluation results.  It was incredibly time consuming.  After bringing in and launching Open Mentoring, I only spend about 10-15% of my time promoting the enterprise mentoring solution to the organization.  We have thousands of learners and advisors connecting with one another with very little intervention from me, or others on my team.  The improvement in the return on our time and energy investment is very noticeable.”
4. Evaluate, Re-vision, Repeat.  Maintain a learning orientation around what is working best and be sure to incorporate it into future promotional activities.  Be careful not to approach it with a “once-and-done” attitude.

The alternative to the above is to continue to spend a mind-numbing amount of time running an antiquated type of process that impacts very few people in the grand scheme of things.  Seems like an easy choice to me.