How do you promote your mentoring program and attract potential mentors and mentees?

As a former senior Banker, and a business and personal coach through my own coaching business I have a passion for helping others succeed in Business. My experience covers all sectors and business sizes. My skills cover coaching, mentorship and financial and business strategy consulting. I have very strong inter personal skills and 40 years of experience in advising businesses.

A good and effective mentoring program creates an ideal environment that sustains continual employee growth. Mentorship programs can provide a culture you want within your organization. When you are mentoring your employees, you are giving them the tools and resources they need to progress and grow into the leaders and changemakers of your company. Employees grow professionally and advance within a company.

Also consider what type of mentoring that you'll be focussing on or is it a mixture: One on One mentoring Reverse mentoring Group mentoring Peer mentoring Flash mentoring Will the matching be carried out by a system or self select by the mentees?

Understanding the prerequisites/preferences of both the mentor and mentee is critical for the relationship to succeed. In other words, there needs to be a firm understanding of the type of people each party prefers.

Promoting a mentoring program and attracting potential mentors and mentees requires a thoughtful and strategic approach. Although it is still in early stages, I have found word-of-mouth referrals from my existing networks and clients being a useful approach to attracting prospective mentees. This has also been supplemented by testimonials received from mentees who are willing to highlight their success stories and that has a potential to inspire prospective mentees. I have realized that promoting a mentoring or a coaching program takes time and effort and as such have adopted a patient and persistent attitude towards building my coaching and mentoring programs.

I love a catchy name and logo, as long as the programme isn't style over substance. If you have other related programmes or learning you can create a recognisable identity/brand. This would help when marketing your offering to the target audience. You could also use this to create a teaser campaign as part of your comms plan.

Highlighting the success stories can also demonstrate how mentoring complements your wider performance cycle, such as career frameworks and appraisal discussions.

You could also use other mentors to mentor new mentors. Create role-model mentors and showcase people who have transitioned from mentee to mentor.

I believe that it's extremely important to get the employees needs on mentoring and get also the employees skills to be mentors. Then with a plan and all this information, we can create a project where mentors and mentees can learn and improve from this. I would also invest in sharing the value of being a mentor as a career progression contribution, introducing also the merit and recognition of it, since as we all know mentors are usually recognized as experts in their knowledge. Share a plan were exists the alignment of mentors and mentees, will be a win-win for both sides and the company.