What Employers Can Gain from Successful Peer Mentoring Programs

I am a huge fan of peer mentoring and here is why: 

Peer mentors can be tremendous assets to organizations. They help welcome new hires and pass along appropriate knowledge about the company, further develop your people and can even assist experienced employees grow and increase their levels of productivity. 

If you want to implement a successful peer mentoring program, you will want to avoid making mistakes, as employees are involved in the process. A successful program requires strong support, so you certainly do not want to randomly pair-up individuals. The following provides more details about what I mean:   

1. Make sure you have the support or the backing of the executive management team. Otherwise, you may not get the time or resources you need for both the mentor and the mentee to have a successful experience. Not having this support could be the ‘death sentence’ for a peer mentoring program.
2. Carefully examine the key characteristics of your mentors/mentees.

• For the mentors: You certainly want individuals who are extremely competent in their skills and knowledge base. But, more importantly, these individuals should possess a strong desire to mentor and help develop their peers. Effective mentors are those with a ‘big picture’ goal in mind; one of helping to improve the performances of both the team and the mentee.
• For both mentor/mentee: Your goal, of course, is a good match. You want to help these individuals, through training or ongoing dialogue, as they build an avenue of communication. As they develop their relationship, you want them to have the tools they need to make allowances or corrections. This is important so that their relationship ends up with maximum results. Otherwise, if the relationship gets off to a bad start and they grow uncomfortable with one another, what you want to see happen—which is the teambuilding phase—will fade away and die off.
• Very important component: I am a strong believer in recognizing these peer mentoring teams and their success. This recognition will go a long way in building that desire for other individuals to join the program. 

How does peer mentoring work in the real-life business world? 

Here is a story that may help illustrate how such a program can help an apprehensive new employee. I know an individual who had a very tough time participating in team and project update meetings. For example, he held back on interjecting ideas, and he didn’t understand meeting guidelines. 

He also encountered some issues of detecting subtleties: He had a problem understanding who ‘owned’ the project and who possessed the power and responsibilities. As a way to help draw out this individual, we engaged him in an ongoing, back and forth dialogue. We asked him specific questions such as: “How do you see your ideas working?” And, “What kinds of suggestions do you have for making this project more successful and efficient?” We also shared our experiences as a way to help him avoid some potholes along the way.

Peer mentoring programs allow most new employees to get a jump on the learning curve. New employees want to be productive and they want to get comfortable in their new environment, but they need insights into their teammates and all the idiosyncrasies that exist within the organization. 

Some people have a more difficult time than others reaching that level of comfort within a new organization. They need to understand where the information and resources are so they can help the team/organization succeed. A mentor can be that new employee’s advocate, someone who they turn to, even when they have a ‘dumb’ question to ask. They need to feel as though they will not be judged by asking those so-called dumb questions. 

As previously mentioned, mentors can also warn mentees about the errors they will want to avoid.  Mentors can say to the mentees, “Here are the mistakes I made, so I think you might want to avoid them in the future.” 

Organizations are, and will continue to be, well rewarded by implementing a successful peer mentoring program. These relationships can end up saving companies valuable time and resources, while developing more confident and project-management savvy professionals.

Peer mentors can be tremendous assets to organizations.