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Business success is dependent on employee engagement and development. Mentorship is a proven component of a healthy and thriving workforce, but helping employees build  meaningful mentor-mentee relationships is not as easy as you would think. 

Julie Kantor, founder and CEO of Twomentor, has made it her mission to help people and the companies they work for create mentorship programs that deliver real value. In fact, she has more than 20 years of workforce development experience, delivering keynotes on mentorship and entrepreneurship around the globe. Today, Twomentor works with clients to build sustainable inclusion mentoring and sponsorship initiatives to drive employee engagement and retention. 

In this episode, Julie walks us through how companies can step up (or create) their mentorship programs and explains what so many people are getting wrong that prevents them from fully reaping the benefits of their mentor-mentee relationships. 

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• What companies are doing wrong that leads to mentorship program failure.

• What to change to create momentum for your program.

• What leaders and employees both need to do to promote the sustainability of their program and get the most out of it.

A Mission-Driven Journey into the World of Mentorship

Julie’s journey into mentorship was predicated on a series of events that happened early in her life and career. Inspired by her father, a Holocaust survivor who escaped to America and worked tirelessly to create a new life for himself, Julie learned at a young age to be a self-starter. “He taught me that you can build a life from tragedy and pain, and you can create something amazing.” She caught the entrepreneurship bug. 

After college, Julie started her career at Inc. Magazine. It was during this time that she heard another story that would change the course of her life. The keynote speaker at one of Inc.’s entrepreneurship conferences shared his experience of being mugged by adolescents in New York City. The altercation was so life-changing, he pivoted from his corporate executive job to build an entrepreneurial education program  to help underprivileged kids learn business skills. That way, they could earn their own money and, hopefully, transcend poverty. This eventually became the non-profit Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE).

As the daughter of a refugee, Julie found motivation in this story from Steve Mariotti, the founder of NFTE, and it inspired her to do something to help people, too. She took up volunteer work at NTFE which led to her down the path of entrepreneurial success at age 22 founding the Boston region and then serving as the executive director for the Washington DC region. 

At NFTE, she built a program where entrepreneurs would come and mentor inner city kids on their business plans and saw the power and impact it had on everyone involved. She was also the beneficiary of valuable mentorship, and all her experiences taught her just how important and effective the mentor-mentee relationships can be for employees and executives alike.

Julie continued to learn throughout her work experiences and leadership roles what it took to produce real, lasting results from mentorship programs — especially in the business world. She saw a gap where the intentions to establish efforts were there (and there was a business case to support it). However, there weren’t any initiatives employed to realize them. 

In 2015, she launched Twomentor as a corporate mentoring solution to work with clients to build sustainable inclusion mentoring + sponsorship initiatives to drive employee engagement and retention. 

Misconceptions and Roadblocks Preventing Mentorship Program Success

While many companies today might have something resembling a mentorship program, they are unmonitored, underutilized and essentially, ineffective. In her work with dozens of companies, Julie has found that there is the false assumption that mentorship is happening once they put people together. Without any training,  that just doesn’t work.

Even when companies create programs and commonly base them on best-practices, they don’t necessarily reflect the actual collective wants and needs of their employees. When a program can’t deliver value in a relevant way, it fails.

Further, scheduling conflicts, lack of communication, and lack of clear direction all inhibit the progress of a mentor-mentee relationship. And when potential mentors and mentees are unclear of the objectives and expectations, both parties become unmotivated. All of these problems must be addressed to create an effective program.

What it takes to Break Through and Create Meaningful Connections 

There are several components that need to be considered to build a sustainable mentorship program. It starts with setting specific goals, objectives and strategies — a blueprint for everyone involved. And you have to think about how you will facilitate diversity in that plan.

Be specific on the activities that everyone should be responsible for. Mentors and mentees need to have clarity around their roles, the program expectations up front, and come prepared to engage and participate. At the end of the day, meaningful connections are built through reciprocation—how can you help the person helping you?

Finally, creating any kind of culture, including a culture of mentorship, starts at the top. Buy-in from the leadership team is crucial to the success of your program—but follow-up from everyone else is what keeps it going.

Julie’s Career Advice

• Failure is neither fatal nor final. So, we have to become more resilient, and we have to be willing from time to time to fall on our faces without shame, and understand that it's a stumbling block. 

• You have to dust yourself off and celebrate small wins because life is hard.

• People are not thinking about you as often as you think they are. People live in their own reality, and we just have always do our best and try to keep our sides of the streets clean.

  
  

Key Takeaways: 

• Millennials are driven by being mentored— they want to know a company is focused on their learning, their leadership, their development, and often that purpose. For them it’s knowing that “people care” that takes precedence over paycheck.

• Mentorship is a strong recruitment tool for Gen Z workers (and Millennials) — so you want your program to have demonstrated success.

• Leaders need to champion the program from the top in order to create a mentoring culture, and not just a mentoring initiative. 

• You need to have a strategy from the beginning as well as systems in place to address their concerns in order to develop a true culture of mentorship. Without putting the necessary discipline, planning, programs, and training in place, it isn't going to get the right traction.

• The  plan must address how employees learn from each other through mentoring.

  • What are the goals of all the participants? What are the company goals?

  • Who will mentor whom? Who can participate?

  • How will you handle knowledge transfer (who does the senior leadership pass the baton to)?

• Training mentors and mentees at the outset is critical. Both parties need to know what to expect and how to handle different scenarios. 

  • Ex: What do you do if your mentor keeps canceling appointments? How do you handle things? What do you do if the mentee does not have tangible goals?

  • You also need to train mentees on accepting critical feedback, and on creating a clear outline of their goals.

• Ensure there is a diverse representation in your program, so those involved  don’t learn from only like-minded people. 

• Consider reverse mentoring, where younger employees that are more skilled in technology or collaboration tools might be able to train people who aren’t as tech savvy.

• Know the difference between a mentor and a sponsor: a mentor speaks with you, and a sponsor speaks about you and champions you to others. There are opportunities to cultivate both in your program.

• Leaders should make a point to focus on curbing corporate loneliness because it leads to employee burnout. While technology enables teams to work faster and more efficiently, it comes at the expense of real human connections that are vital to our well-being. Mentorship can help reverse the loneliness epidemic among the Millennial/Gen Z workforce. 

• If you work remotely or run a remote workforce, there are several options for getting mentorship support:

  • See if your alma mater offers a mentoring program.

  • Check with your employee resource groups and a chart at your company to see if they have an official mentoring program.

  • Look for groups and associations online.

You can leverage video services (Zoom, Google Chat, Facetime) for your sessions. 

• If you’re a younger worker and your company doesn’t have a mentorship program, don’t be afraid to ask. 

  • Go to leadership or HR to get their perspective. And a lot of people will tell you that they did have a mentor and how important that was, and you can use that to ask to set up a program in your company.

• It’s all about building meaningful connections that are reciprocal in nature.  If you're asking someone for help determine how there are ways you can help them too. 

Resources:

• Connect with Julie via Email 

• Visit Twomentor's website

• Watch “Four Ways to Start Your Corporate Mentoring Program”

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