Successful leaders don’t come from nowhere. Though you might strike lucky during recruitment, you may also have a goldmine of potential among your existing employees.
A mentoring program that nurtures high-potential employees is not something businesses can ignore, especially if they want to build a strong leadership pipeline and even stronger strategic thinking, which can set apart companies that succeed from those that struggle. It’s no wonder 98% of Fortune 500 companies have mentoring programs; the value of mentoring speaks for itself.
Here’s everything you need to know about leadership mentoring, along with some helpful resources for developing one of your own.
What Is Leadership Mentoring?
Leadership mentoring programs are a form of workplace mentoring specifically designed to prepare employees for future leadership roles. These are mentoring relationships where the mentor has been in the profession or organization for a long enough time to have acquired valued skills and insights, while the mentee leverages that experience for personal and professional growth.
Mentoring motivates employees to learn and grow by exposing them to diverse learning experiences, challenges, and opportunities—all while providing support for development and growth. This is so much better than promoting people to new roles with bigger responsibilities and expecting them to develop the skill set required on their own.
What Are the Types of Leadership Mentoring?
There are as many kinds of mentoring as there are days of the week, but leadership mentoring is best conducted in the following settings:
- One-on-one mentoring: This is when, say, well-established, experienced leaders take mentees with promising leadership potential under their wing. They provide input on how the mentee can strengthen leadership skills (such as communication and conflict resolution) and act as a sounding board for problems that new, future leaders may face.
- Group mentoring: This involves one senior employee mentoring a group of mentees. It’s ideal for business expansion, where multiple new leaders might need to step up at the same time, and for identifying high-potential employees to further invest in (i.e., through more targeted 1:1 mentoring).
- Peer mentoring: Peer mentoring works well when the mentor and mentee are close in age or experience. For leadership development efforts, this could involve pairing a recently promoted executive with the next in line behind them, allowing them to pass on the wisdom they have recently learned while it is still fresh in their mind.
- Reverse mentoring: With reverse mentoring, senior leaders are put into the role of the mentee, while junior-level employees serve as mentors. Quite often, reverse mentoring programs focus on helping senior leaders develop new technical skills or understand and acclimate to cultural differences between older and younger generations within the organization.
Not every type of mentoring can necessarily act as an effective mentoring program. Leadership mentoring needs to be structured and discerning. The aim is to raise up the next generation of leaders; a weak approach could leave them feeling adrift with no real support behind them.
3 Ways to Develop Leaders Effectively
There are multiple routes you can take to develop leaders effectively. Here are three that we recommend you consider that we’ve seen used successfully:
1. Find and Train High-Potential Employees Internally
There is no greater boon to your organization than promoting a future leader from within. In fact, multiple studies show that when you focus on promoting team members internally to leadership roles rather than bringing in your leaders from the outside, you boost the morale of your existing employees. That’s not even mentioning data that shows external hires tend to cost more and perform worse than internal hires.
Create a High Potential Mentoring Program. These programs are typically invite-only and allow you to identify high potentials, connect them with existing leaders, and help mentor them and guide them toward effective leadership.
2. Create Training Programs for Existing Leaders
What do you do with your existing leadership? New leaders are often highly skilled from a technical standpoint in the practices of their function, but may lack the soft skills that are essential for good leadership. More tenured leaders may need some updating on the technical aspects of their roles or may need to update their knowledge and understanding of younger workers.
Traditional Leadership Development can either be broad (organization-wide) or specific to the function. Your primary goal is to ensure that leaders who enter this program do so knowing where their gaps in understanding exist and what they’ll learn as a program participant. Tenured senior leaders tend to make excellent mentors in these types of programs.
3. Improve Onboarding Programs for Newly Hired Leaders
Although hiring leaders externally carries some risks and is the less-ideal route to take in most cases, hiring leaders externally for some roles is necessary for most organizations.
Onboarding is essential for developing leaders brought in from outside the organization, especially because managers typically need a tailored onboarding experience that differs from other roles. New employees, or those who have been with the company for less than two years, are 38% more likely to quit in the next 12 months. All employees, including leaders you’ve hired externally, need that dedicated time to become familiar with their role and your organization. Even managers need time and space to become acclimated to your organization.
Setting up an Onboarding Mentoring Program is a great way to accomplish this task. You may even want to consider a Reverse Mentoring format for onboarding external leaders, as it allows the tenured but lower-level team member to take on a leadership role.
What Are the Characteristics of an Effective Leadership Mentoring Program?
While a general mentoring program helps mentees grow in broader areas of career development, a leadership mentoring program, as the name suggests, needs to be specific to leadership development.
It may be helpful to think of it like building a house, beginning with the following materials:
- Support system: This is the foundation of the program. The program needs a supportive communication system at its heart to facilitate easy connections and comprehensive support to administrators. Award-winning mentoring software from MentorcliQ provides this.
- Framework/structure: We’re all busy. Scheduling tools and a pre-made mentoring plan ensure that mentoring sessions are prioritized and have a clear purpose.
- Well-defined learning opportunities: The first mentoring session should be an opportunity for the mentee to communicate specific development goals. For leadership mentoring, this should include a variety of learning experiences that give mentees a chance to practice new leadership skills. For more guidance on this, check out how to create a mentoring action plan.
- Flexibility: Sometimes our best-made plans don’t come to fruition. Or maybe circumstances change and the original mentoring plan isn’t as good a fit as originally anticipated. In these cases, having a mentoring program with an in-built contingency plan will help to keep things running smoothly, no matter what.
In smaller companies, mentoring relationships may develop organically, but in most cases— particularly for larger organizations—mentoring relationships tend to occur through the intentional implementation of mentoring programs.
And to complete the blueprint for success, you need one final piece: well-matched mentor and mentee relationships.
The Role of Leadership Mentors and Mentees
Leadership mentors usually help their mentees grow in soft skills, such as active listening, conflict management, and delegation, to name a few. Most importantly, they empower mentees to recognize their own potential as they step into leadership roles.
The role of a great leadership mentor includes:
- Discovering hidden talents
- Helping high-potentials to close skills gaps
- Encouraging future and current leaders to expand on their abilities
- Providing networking opportunities for high-potential team members
- Providing space for mentees to acquire knowledge related to effective leadership and, equally important, to learn and make mistakes without judgment
Qualities to Look for in a Mentor
The best boxers don’t always make the best trainers.
The best basketball players aren’t always the best coaches.
The same goes with leadership in an organization. Possessing industry or topical knowledge is great, but knowing how to effectively impart that knowledge to others is a completely different skill.
So, while it may be tempting to look to the most qualified senior employee for mentorship, mentees should note that successful mentoring relationships require more than industry know-how. As well as expertise, they also should look for:
- Honesty
- Approachability
- Good listening skills
- The ability to give constructive feedback
Qualities to Look for in a Mentee
The most successful restaurants have one thing in common: They source and use the best ingredients. No matter how seasoned (pun intended) the chef is, there is only so much they can do with subpar tomatoes.
In a similar vein, leadership mentors need to seek high-quality individuals to be their mentees. Mentees don’t have to be perfect (then what’s the point of mentoring after all?), but they do need to demonstrate leadership potential, as well as:
- Humility
- Curiosity
- Open-mindedness
- Eagerness to learn
- The ability to take initiative
It also goes without saying that both mentor and mentee need to be able and willing to commit the necessary time towards the mentoring relationship.
Benefits of Leadership Mentoring
We can talk about how a leadership development program should run until the cows come home, but what benefits does it actually bring you? You may not be surprised to learn that a good leadership mentoring program can touch all areas of your company, from the business itself down to the people gaining valuable insights from the program.
Benefits of Leadership Mentoring for Businesses
Leadership mentoring will carry benefits across your entire organization, most of which can be tracked using performance metrics. Some of these benefits include:
Business Longevity
Regardless of the industry, part of the responsibility of the company’s senior managers and executives is to create a strong line of capable future leaders to take over their roles when the time comes. To ensure this, leadership mentoring can be used to identify and train those with high leadership potential.
Increased Employee Retention
According to Forbes, one of the main reasons new employees quit their jobs within the first six months is due to an absence of career development opportunities.
The opportunity for leadership development is particularly appealing to 91% of millennials, who cite career progression as the most important thing for them in a job. Given that leadership mentoring increases the likelihood of promotion, businesses need to take it seriously.
It’s also worth noting that companies that invest in their employees’ professional development attract the best candidates, including those with the best leadership potential.
Better Management Practices
Poor management practices are another key reason people quit. Leadership mentoring addresses skills deficiencies early on to help avoid poor management practices in the future.
Enhanced Knowledge Sharing
Employees gain internal knowledge and skills from long-term experience in an organization. This critical know-how is invaluable for organizations and can be retained by passing it down to future leaders.
Reduced Expenses
Hiring externally for leadership positions is more expensive than training and promoting employees internally. Internal promotion can also reduce the time and resources required for the hiring process.
Improved Onboarding for New Hires
This sounds contradictory to what we have just said above, but sometimes hiring leaders from outside is necessary. When you do, you shouldn’t assume they’re coming in with all of the requisite skills needed to be an effective leader, especially at a company where they aren’t already familiar with the culture and processes.
There’s no better way to prepare internal employees for bigger responsibilities, or to make sure external leadership hires are effective, than with a leadership mentoring program.
Benefits of Leadership Mentoring for Mentees
Does it seem strange to think of a luminary like Oprah Winfrey was once a mentee, and to Maya Angelou no less? The truth is, the most influential leaders were all students once. When they are invested in, mentees profit from:
Enhanced Role Clarity
Mentorship programs create space for high-potential employees to gain clarity on their talents, as well as providing tangible opportunities for growing in confidence, interpersonal skills, and project management.
The relational nature of mentoring makes it easier for organizations to meet people development needs in a personalized way, avoiding the dreaded “cog-in-a-machine syndrome,” which is common in larger organizations where employees feel undervalued, disconnected from their work, and unsure of their career trajectory.
Networking Opportunities
Aside from the knowledge and wisdom they can impart to their mentees, mentors also have connections to some of the most influential people in the industry. In other words, they have the power to push high-performing mentees to other learning opportunities by introducing them to people who can help advance their development and growth.
Increased Sense of Belonging and Support
Mentoring programs can improve a company’s efforts in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) by ensuring that historically marginalized groups receive the support they need to step into leadership roles. This is important, as a 2023 report by McKinsey & Co. shows that very diverse companies consistently perform better financially than less diverse companies.
Benefits of Leadership Mentoring for Mentors
Historically, mentorship was seen as a pretty one-sided relationship. This notion has since shifted, with mentors also benefitting from mentorship programs. As leadership mentors, they can expect to experience:
Increased Confidence in Their Leadership Role
The old adage “the best way to learn something is to teach it” rings particularly true for leadership mentoring. When a mentor shares their expertise with a mentee, they establish it clearly in their own mind, and they are forced to identify knowledge gaps, if any.
Increased Job Satisfaction
Mentors become more satisfied with their roles in the company if they know they are leaving a lasting legacy through training future leaders. We don’t just make this up: we’ve found that 95% of mentors who use MentorcliQ mentoring software find the relationship useful.
Fresh, Renewed Energy!
Mentees may also motivate mentors by bringing new perspectives and a much-needed dose of fresh energy. A little change in perspective can work wonders for everyone.
Now It’s Your Turn.
Leadership mentoring is important, we all know that, but it can’t be left to happen organically. Structure is key to developing leadership skills that actually support organizational success. Create a leadership mentoring program that actually works. And by “works”, we mean:
- Your program is launched quickly (there’s no time to waste!)
- HRIS data is deeply integrated into the program structure
- Mentors and mentees matches are created intelligently and without bias
- Mentors have critical access to training on how to be successful
- Program managers can collect, analyze, and report ROI data with ease
Does that sound like what you need to get started on your mentoring program for leaders? What you need is one software to coordinate everything, from matching partnerships to facilitating communication. Book a demo to see how MentorcliQ’s award-winning software can help.
