*Parts of this blog post have been previously published in our monthly newsletter titled, Business Mentoring: How We Match Mentors and Mentees.
In our last blog post, we discussed How to Make a Successful Match Between a Mentor and a Mentee and we shared some of the ideas behind Management Mentors’ algorithm which was born from our 90% success rate in mentor/mentee matching.
In this post, we are going to tackle three of the biggest mistakes companies make when it comes to matching mentors and mentees:
It gets too political. Someone on the committee is overly influential and may force matches based on office politics rather than the recommended matches.
It gets too political. Someone on the committee is overly influential and may force matches based on office politics rather than the recommended matches.- A committee makes the matches but must send them to upper management for review, at which time upper management makes changes (and not for the better). The problem with this is that upper management was not involved in the committee meetings and discussions, so they might not understand the reasoning behind the matches.
- People put too much emphasis on percentages. Our matching system provides a “matching percentage” between mentors and mentees. So Jim Smith might be rated as a 58% match to Kim Jones, based on the matching algorithm. Percentages should be seen as a starting point for discussions, not the be-all end-all.
Do any of these mistakes sound familiar to you? If your company has made these mistakes and now finds itself with an unsuccessful mentoring program, can it be fixed? It sure can. The first step is recognizing where the problems lie. We have plenty of resources that you can share with the executives at your company which will help to find a solution to your broken matching system and/or mentoring program. If you recognize that your company’s mentoring program needs help with mentoring matching, check out our FREE resources below.