Mentorship is a powerful tool that can be used to help entrepreneurs and business owners effectively grow, scale, and delegate. A successful mentoring strategy can provide countless opportunities for growth within an organization and will help the members to become more efficient, productive, and effective at their jobs.

Mentorship is different from formal training programs. Mentorship is more personal, hands on and involves a less formal one-to-one approach at making your team work more cohesively. It’s about assigning the most important people in your organization to mentor the best and brightest newcomers so that you can expand your abilities with confidence and consistency.

Growing Your Talent Pool

Growing your talent pool within your growing company is more important than ever. But unfortunately, not everyone in your company is suited for mentoring. We often work with entrepreneurs whose employees and leaders may not have the experience, passion and bandwidth for the roles they are asked to fill. Those employees may be in their positions because during periods of growth, no one else could take on those roles and they stepped up. But if you’re serious about growth, it’s important to have people who love what they’re doing in the right roles.

There isn’t much you can do about their passion for their role, although mentorship can help employees stay motivated and engaged.  But if bandwidth and competence are an issue, then mentorship can be the solution. Many times, a lack of bandwidth comes from not having the experience and training you need to be efficient in your role.

As your company grows, positions enlarge making it more and more difficult for your key players to take on multiple roles. That also cuts into their bandwidth and limits your ability to continue to grow. Mentorship helps you with succession planning so that you can anticipate changing roles and help your leaders prepare for transitions and future needs.

Most importantly, many entrepreneurial leaders initially grow their company by means of personal heroics. You know everything about your own company, so you can jump in to almost any situation with new ideas and solutions. But you are also establishing yourself as a major choke point if your employees feel they need to check all their decisions through your office.

If you want to continue to grow, you must be willing to let go and allow your best employees to take on a new range of skills and expertise so you can spend more of your time on vision.

Make Mentoring a Formal Part of Your Cadences

Mentoring usually doesn’t happen by itself. You must make it part of your culture and dedicate specific cycles to it.

1. Choose Your Mentors

These are not always managers. Some people are great at specific tasks while other are great at organization. Pick people who know their job very well and are good at working with others. Make sure they are committed to growing the organization.

When you choose a mentor, be very clear in your communication to them how important they are to you, so they don’t feel threatened in training others. Let them know you appreciate them so much that you want to “clone,” them as much as possible so they feel secure in their job. That confidence will let them mentor more freely.

2. Assign Trainees

You may already have a list of people in mind in your company that you want to develop. Ask your mentors for their lists as well because they are on the front lines and can help you identify employees with initiative. Give each mentor a list of up to three people to mentor at a time. This is a purposeful number to keep the workload down, but also help spread more connections through your company.

3. Work with Your Mentors on Setting Goals

The goals should be specific to the situation each employee faces. Again, this isn’t a formal training program, so the goals won’t be related to getting 20 employees certified or moving more support tickets through the queue. They will be goals that relate to the unique growth needs of each employee.

You should meet with your mentors each month – it is fine and even preferred to do this as a group – and lay out goals specific to the employees they are mentoring. Things like:

• I think Bradley doesn’t feel comfortable with Adobe Illustrator, I’d like you to spend some specific time this month showing him training resources.
• Helen seems a little introverted, can you help her expand her network this month? Take her to lunch with five other people next Thursday.
• Oliver is smart, but his emails are really making people mad. Can you work with him on being more detailed and empathetic? Maybe ask him to visit with people in their cubicles before sending an email.
• Maria is ready to take on level two support, but I think she lacks report building expertise. Work with her on building five new reports so that she feels more confident.

4. Dedicate Time to Mentoring

Make sure they know that mentoring is an important part of their job. They need to calendar at least one hour per week for each employee they are mentoring. It can be a formal meeting, or lunch, or a walk around the building to check in. But it must be a calendared commitment. And you should calendar time with them to check in. As mentioned above, it is preferable to bring your mentors into a single meeting each month. It is more respectful of everyone’s time. But more importantly, it gives you mentors the chance so share ideas and improve collaboration and friendships. Regularly scheduled meetings can provide valuable opportunities to discuss issues related to business strategy, career development or any other topics that may be beneficial for the growth of your company.