Choosing the right mentorship goals and objectives for your workplace mentoring program

Launching a workplace mentorship program has countless benefits. For starters, you'll amp up the personal and professional development of both mentees and mentors. And through different formats like one-on-one mentoring, reverse mentoring, and peer mentoring, you can help employees grow their skills and progress in their careers – all while building their networks and forming connections. It’s a win-win.

But unless you take the time to clearly define your mentorship goals, it can be hard to keep track of how your program is performing. That’s why Together recommends identifying your mentoring program’s north star—the purpose or goal of your program and the benefit you expect it to deliver your company.

A mentoring platform like Together can help you realize your mentoring program’s north star by removing manual work from running the program and allowing you to focus on its impact instead.

Here’s our take on this topic: Having clear mentoring goals and objectives is critical to your program’s success. Let’s take a closer look at why you should set goals, how to set them, and other tips to help you run a successful mentorship program. 

Why start a workplace mentorship program in the first place?  

Before we get too far in this discussion, it’s worth taking a moment to understand why you’re planning to have a mentoring program. What are some of the reasons why companies decide to have these programs in the first place? 

Here are a few of the most compelling benefits mentoring programs offer. 

The benefits of mentoring for employees, include: 

• Engagement: Employees who participate in mentorship programs tend to feel more connected to their work and more loyalty to the organization, which boosts overall employee engagement.  
• Skill development: Because mentorship offers guided learning and individualized feedback, mentees acquire new skills and refine existing ones, which speeds up their professional development. 
• A clearer vision of career progression: Junior mentees and new employees may not yet have a clear understanding of the different career paths that are open to them. With a mentor, they can learn about different options as well as the steps they’ll need to take to pursue them. 
• Greater job satisfaction: The support that mentees receive from their mentor often translates to a stronger sense of belonging and commitment to the company.  

The benefits of mentoring for employers include: 

• Improved employee retention: Companies with mentorship programs tend to have higher retention rates since employees are more likely to stay with an employer when they feel invested in and supported. 
• Future leadership pipeline: If you’re thinking about succession planning for your organization, mentorship can be an effective way to prepare employees to take on leadership roles in the future. 
• Better workplace culture: Because mentoring strengthens relationships across disciplines and levels, it can lead to a more collaborative and positive workplace culture. 
• Increased productivity: Mentorship helps employees develop critical skills, so they become more productive in their roles. Program participants may also gain a broader perspective that helps them see ways of making improvements in different areas of your company’s performance. 

Now that you have a better idea of what it’s possible to achieve with a mentorship program, we’ll consider why it’s a good idea to set mentoring program goals.  

Why should you set mentoring goals for your program? 

To put it simply: Setting goals should be a non-negotiable part of your mentorship plan because it helps you speak the language your company’s leaders care about. This is how you get their attention (and support). 

Not sure how to start? We’ll walk you through it. A good rule of thumb is to understand what your business leaders care about most. What’s keeping them up at night? This will often fall into a few major buckets, such as: 

• Staying ahead of competitors by continuing to innovate and improve your existing products and services 
• Retaining high-performing employees  
• Creating a succession plan so you have a pipeline of potential future leaders 

Once you understand what these high-level goals are, you can start to think about how you might connect them to L&D initiatives like your mentorship program. For example: 

• If your goal is innovation, this involves making sure your employees have the right skills to drive innovation and sell and market these new products to customers. 
• If your goal is retaining high-performing employees, this involves keeping them engaged and giving them the opportunity to grow and take on new challenges. 
• If your goal is creating a succession plan, this involves offering training and skills development so today’s new hires or junior employees can move into leadership roles in the future. 

Wendy Axelrod, author of 10 Steps to Successful Mentoring, explains that the purpose of your mentorship program should always “be linked to some type of strategy, whether it is a talent development strategy, a diversity, an inclusion strategy, [or] a succession management process.” 

But why is this important? Connecting your goals to business strategy will help get executives and other leaders bought into the program. Not only will they be excited about seeing the results you’re aiming to achieve, but they’ll be much more likely to invest resources into a program if it connects with business goals. It’s much easier to get leaders (and finance teams) to invest money in something if you can demonstrate that you’re getting a good return on investment in terms of benefits to your business. 

If you want to get sponsorship and support for your mentoring program, setting clear goals and objectives is one of the best ways to achieve that. Wondering what types of goals and objectives to set? Let’s explore some common ones. 

What are some examples of common objectives for mentoring programs? 

The Objectives and Key Results (OKR) framework was popularized by Google and many companies use it to guide their goal setting.  

When you use the OKR framework, you start with an objective (you could also call this an “aim” or a “goal”). Then you outline a few key results that will help you see whether you’re on track to meet that objective. These key results tend to include specific numbers—like a percentage increase or decrease—and within a given timeframe (like a quarter or six months).

Let’s look at some examples of objectives for mentoring programs. 

9 common mentoring objectives 

1. ‍Develop emerging leaders: Help high-performing or high-potential employees develop their leadership skills. 
2. ‍Accelerate new hire onboarding: Provide resources that help new hires understand your company’s expectations and reach full productivity faster. 
3. ‍Promote diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB): Encourage and empower employees from traditionally underrepresented groups to take on leadership and management roles. 
4. Enhance career development: Help participants gain new skills that will allow them to move into new roles or remain competitive in their current ones.‍ 
5. Counterbalance the disconnection that can happen with remote work: Allow remote employees to build their career and network in a remote work environment.‍ 
6. Engage in succession planning: Pair seasoned workers who’ll be moving into retirement with potential future leaders and likely to take over when they leave‍. 
7. Improve culture: Increase cross-functional collaboration and improve relationships among coworkers.‍ 
8. Increase employee retention: Develop more loyalty and encourage employees to stay longer at the organization. ‍ 
9. Enhance your company’s reputation: Promote your mentoring program in your recruiting materials and interview process. 

Matching your mentoring objectives to business key results 

Now that we’ve defined some common objectives and how your mentorship program might help you achieve them, let’s take a look at some potential key results you could use to measure how well your program is performing.  

5 tips to help you choose your mentoring goals 

Of course, the OKR framework is just one way of thinking about goal setting. Another approach you might want to consider is setting SMART goals. 

Here’s how it works: Each letter in SMART stands for a word that helps guide your approach to setting goals. SMART goals are: 

S - Specific 

M - Measurable 

A - Attainable or Achievable 

R - Relevant 

T - Time-bound 

Here are a few additional tips to help you with following the SMART framework.

• What makes a goal specific? It’s clear, concise, and easy to understand whether you’ve met it. It’s the difference between “Get better at sales” vs. “Exceed my sales quota by 10% for the next 3 months.” 
• How do you make a goal measurable? One way is to split it into two parts. Start with the outcome you wish to achieve and then outline the steps you’ll need to take to get there. 
• If possible, try to align your mentorship program’s goals with initiatives from other teams, like Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). For example, if you have DEIB goals for your program, you may be able to coordinate with ERGs ‍to define goals you’d both like to achieve. 
• When creating time-bound goals, don’t just think of the final step. What are some progress points or milestones you’d like to meet along the way?  

Here are a few more tips to help you get the most out of your mentorship program goals.

Tip 1: Encourage mentees to set their own objectives 

While you’ll need to define your own objectives for the program (as we’ve covered in detail so far), it’s also important to encourage mentees to set their own aims for participating in the workplace mentoring program. Setting goals can increase their motivation and boost their chances of sticking with the program.  

Tip 2: Make goals challenging—but still attainable 

While it might be tempting to set a goal like, “25 mentees went through our mentorship program,” this doesn’t demonstrate any benefit to the participants or your business. Try to come up with a goal that’s connected to an ambitious business outcome but still achievable through your mentorship program. You might also find it helpful to think about both short-term and long-term goals. What would you like to achieve in the next quarter vs. over the next year? 

Tip 3: Come up with your action plan 

This is the moment when you’ll connect your high-level goals with the actual steps you can take as the mentorship program manager. Your action plan might include the milestones you hope to hit along the way (again, covering those short-term and long-term goals), the resources you’ll provide to participants, and how you intend to measure the success of your program. 

Tip 4: Provide guidance to mentors and mentees 

The key to a thriving mentoring program is having an active group of mentors and mentees who participate. Make sure you’re setting them up for success by answering any questions they have, collecting feedback from them (and acting on it whenever possible), and helping them see the impact of their participation.  

Tip 5: Don’t forget to celebrate the small wins 

You might not always see major, dramatic changes occur through your mentorship program, but you are likely to encounter all sorts of small wins along the way. Try to make a point out of celebrating those small milestones like having 100 mentees enroll, match with mentors, and then graduate from the program. You might even invite past participants to share their experience when you’re beginning enrollment for the next cohort in order to keep those good vibes flowing. 

Tips for success: How to track the progress of your mentorship program toward your goals 

For small mentoring programs (those with fewer than 10 participants), you can realistically expect to speak with each program participant to learn more about their experience. 

But as the number of participants grows, it will be a lot harder to manually collect feedback on your mentoring program. 

This is where using mentoring software like Together can be a real game-changer:  

• ​Together handles the registration process for both mentors and mentees, collecting critical information about their demographics, experience, and goals that will help match them with a mentor or mentee. 
• ​You can leverage existing employee data and the data collected during registration to build a questionnaire that informs our matching algorithm, which significantly reduces the amount of time you need to spend on admin work. 
• You’ll have access to resources like mentee and mentor handbooks that help participants learn the best practices for building a successful mentoring relationship. 
• ​You can easily monitor your program’s success thanks to reporting features that are built into the software. 
• Employees can access mentorship in the flow of work without switching between apps. Together integrates with Microsoft Teams and Slack if virtual mentoring is a priority. This means  

How to gather feedback from mentors and mentees 

Another important source of data on measuring your program’s success is the mentors and mentees who are participating. One way you can achieve this is through mentorship survey questions (or a series of surveys delivered at various points during the mentor/mentee lifecycle).

Here are some questions you might want to ask your mentors and mentees in a feedback survey: 

1. How satisfied were you with the range of mentors available on a scale of 1 to 10?  
2. What would you change about the matching process going forward? 
3. How would you rate your relationship with your mentor/mentee on a scale of 1 to 10? 
4. What did you enjoy or not enjoy about the program? 
5. What would you change (if anything) about the program?  

Surveying your mentoring program participants will provide valuable feedback that will help you continue to improve your program over time and increase your chances of meeting your goals. 

Clear goals that lead to mentor and mentee success 

Keep in mind that goals aren’t just for you as the mentorship program manager or the mentoring program as a whole—they can also help mentors and mentees make the most out of their experience.  

The way you convey this information is up to you. For example, you might include ideas for goals in the communication you send up once participants have registered for the program. Or, when you hold training for mentors or kick-off sessions for mentees, these could be good moments to remind participants about how beneficial setting goals can be for their experience. 

Looking for some specific ideas of potential goals for mentors and mentees? We’ve got you covered! 

Potential goals for mentors: Remember to focus on leadership skills 

Mentors may have all sorts of motivation for getting involved in your mentorship program—including a genuine desire to help others. But one of the primary reasons they’re likely to be interested is to have the chance to improve or refine their leadership skills.  

If you’d like to suggest specific goals for your mentors, here are a few ideas: 

• Develop leadership skills. Being a mentor involves reflecting on your own experience and offering guidance for how a mentee might apply this. Mentors may also need to help their mentees handle difficult situations and conversations and think carefully about their career progression and career development. They might even want to set goals about specific leadership skills such as communication, prioritization, or decision-making. 
• Improve their visibility and recognition as an advisor throughout the company. Mentors may hope that participating in the mentorship program will build their reputation and lead to more recognition in the company, whether in terms of promotions, speaking opportunities, or better connections with executives. If this is the case, they might want to set goals related to specific outcomes they’d like to achieve through greater visibility. 
• Better communication skills. Mentors need to be skillful listeners. They also need to understand when a mentee is looking for a solution or guidance or when they’d like to work through a problem on their own. Mentors looking to improve specific communication skills like active listening, asking open questions, or handling difficult conversations might want to set goals related to these skills. 
• Gain new perspectives. Communication between mentors and mentees should always be a two-way street. Mentees tend to be part of a different generation than their mentors, so they can share their own perspective on topics like new technology and the future of work. Mentors seeking to be more open-minded or innovative might set goals related to broadening their perspective through their mentoring relationship.  
• Build a talent pipeline. This is a very practical outcome of mentoring relationships—mentors will often identify promising people they’d like to bring onto their own team or refer to their peers. Mentors might choose to set goals related to building a talent pipeline if this is a priority for them. 

Potential goals for mentees: Focus on professional growth

Just like mentors can have all sorts of reasons for wanting to participate in a workplace mentorship program, there are a variety of reasons why mentees may want to participate. Here are a few goals you might want to suggest helping them get the most out of the program.  

• Learn and become familiar with the workplace culture. If mentees are new hires who are currently going through or just completing onboarding, they may be hoping to better understand your company culture and how things work in your company. They might want to set goals related to their confidence in performing certain tasks independently or navigating common workplace scenarios. 
• Develop specific skills. Many mentees join a workplace mentorship program because they’d like to grow their skills and prepare for the future of their careers. They might set goals related to soft skills like conflict management, problem-solving, or negotiation. Or they might have goals around building technical skills like financial forecasting or project management. 
• Expand their network. In your day-to-day work, it can be difficult to meet people from different departments and levels in your company, especially for more junior employees. For this reason, mentees might set goals related to building their network and making connections in different parts of the company. 
• Navigate career progression. Because mentors have more professional experience, they can help mentees explore topics like whether they should apply for a new role or how to explore other disciplines without switching roles. Mentees might therefore set goals related to answering a particular career-related question or overcoming a specific career challenge they’re currently facing. 

How to run a successful mentoring program 

Once you’ve defined your goals and helped mentors and mentees think through what they hope to get out of your mentoring program, you’ve made some great progress, but there’s still plenty of work to do. Here are a few tips to help you run a successful mentorship program. 

Decide whether you’ll follow a cohort or evergreen model 

A mentorship program with a clear start and end date follows the cohort model. In this case, it’s easier to measure results since you have a number of participants who are following the same timeline.  

The evergreen model, on the other hand, allows mentors and mentees to sign up at any time. The benefits of this approach are that it’s more flexible and can potentially lead to a greater number of participants. 

Consider how you’ll ensure every mentoring match is meaningful 

One of the most important components of your program is your approach to matching mentors and mentees. In the early stages or for a pilot program, you might want to take a more hands-on approach to ensure mentors and mentees are well matched. But as your program scales, it'll likely become unsustainable for you to do all the matching manually. Once you reach this stage, you might want to look into mentor matching software that can relieve you of this administrative burden while still creating a great experience for mentors and mentees. 

Get feedback from mentors and mentees

You’ll want to create regular opportunities for mentors and mentees to share their feedback, whether it’s about the matching process, their mentor/mentee, or anything else about the program. Sending out mentorship program surveys at different stages can help you assess how your program is going and give you some early indications about how you’re tracking toward your program goals.

Experiment with different mentoring formats

The typical mentor/mentee relationship has a more senior and experienced person in the mentor role and a more junior person in the mentee role. But there are other formats you might want to consider. These include:   

• Reverse mentoring, when a junior employee acts as the mentor to a more senior employee. This is a great way to give leaders new perspectives and can help connect leaders with talent from underrepresented backgrounds. 
• Peer mentoring, when employees at similar levels or tenures coach each other. 
• Mentoring circles, where employees from all levels in the organization can share their knowledge and experiences and engage in group problem-solving. 

Ensure mentors and mentees have expectations that are aligned 

During the early stages of the mentoring relationship, mentors and mentees should have a conversation where they share their expectations with each other. Some mentorship experts also recommend holding regular check-ins where mentors and mentees take a break from their regular career development conversations to discuss their relationship and identify any areas where they’d like to make changes. 

The exact expectations will vary depending on the mentee, but generally speaking, mentees can expect their mentors to provide accountability, regular communication, and tailored feedback. 

Mentors can expect that their mentees will be respectful of their time, proactively take the lead in their conversations, and follow through with the advice and recommendations their mentor shares. 

Use mentoring software that integrates with the tools you’re already using 

One surefire way to hurt your mentorship program participation? By making employees sign into another platform that requires a new username, password, and navigating an entirely new user interface. You can avoid this hassle by choosing mentorship software that integrates with tools you’re already using, like Microsoft Teams. With some mentoring platforms, like Together, participants and admins can choose to get mentoring alerts in their DMs or via email so they never miss out on key updates. 

Remember: Defining your mentorship goals is just the first step 

You’ve now got ideas on how you might set goals for your mentorship program. Plus, we’ve provided some starting points to help you guide mentors and mentees toward setting their own goals for participating. And you’ve also got plenty of tips and advice to help you run a successful program. 

What’s next? Now it’s time to actually get your program up and running! If you’re not sure what to do or you need a little extra support, Together is here for you. Our mentorship software takes care of the administrative tasks like registration, matching, and reporting. If you’d like to see how we can best support you in reaching your mentoring goals, get in touch to learn more about Together mentoring software.