Introduction :

A mentor is a person or friend who guides a less experienced person by building trust and
modeling positive behaviors. An effective mentor understands that his or her role is to be
dependable, engaged, authentic, and tuned into the needs of the mentee.

Today, most youth development organizations recognize the importance of a child having a
caring responsible adult in their lives. For children who come from less than ideal
circumstances, mentoring can be a critical ingredient towards positive youth outcomes.

The word mentor comes from the character "Mentor" in Homer's epic tale, The Odyssey.
Mentor was a trusted friend of Odysseus, the king of Ithaca. When Odysseus fought in the
Trojan War, Mentor served as friend and counsel to Odysseus' son Telemachus . Riverside
Websters II New College Dictionary 1995 defines a mentor as a wise and trusted teacher or
counselor. The act of mentoring is a series of ongoing and little successes. You will be able
to make a real impact through consistent and ongoing relationship building.

How do we get started?

Mentors/Mentees will be advised of their pairing by First week of August 2017.

A meet and greet session will be held in the same week .
From there, it is the mentees responsibility to drive the program by organising the meetings.
Meetings can be an informal chat of about 30 to 45 minutes, or a formal and structure session
as per what is agreed between the mentor and mentee. As a general guide, mentoring sessions
should be scheduled as follows:

1) The end of week one after the introduction to your mentor

2) Once every three-four weeks or so for the duration of the program
3) Continuation of the relationship following the conclusion of the program is at the mentor
and mentees discretion. If continuing a minimum of quarterly meetings are recommended

The Mentee is expected to:

1) Be available to actively participate in five or more one-on-one mentoring sessions with

their mentor during the 16 week period .
2) It is the mentees responsibility to drive this program by organising the meetings, setting a
suitable time, location and agenda .
3) Inform the organising committee if you are having problems with your mentor .
4) Listen, clarify, reflect and challenge .
5) Identify your own development goals for discussion and refinement with your mentor .
6) Be open to and appreciate different perspectives .
7) Build trust in the relationship and maintain confidentiality .
8) Keep your mentor in the loop even when things are going well and regular meetings may
not be required (i.e. let your mentor know you do not need a meeting in the near term and
when you anticipate your next meeting may be) .
9) Keep a Mentoring Diary Sheet for each meeting which will be used as evidence whenever
required.

The Mentor is expected to:

1) Be available to actively participate in five or more sessions with their mentee during the 12
week period
2) Empower mentees to solve their own problems by giving advice
3) Provide mentees with a safe space for raising and talking about issues, by way of non-
directive dialogue rather than instruction and coaching
4) Help mentees reflect on their thoughts, beliefs, feelings and behaviours
5) Build trust in the relationship and maintain confidentiality
6) Support mentees in discovering and defining their own development needs
7) Sharing your own expertise, experience and mistakes to help mentees develop theirs
8) Inform the organising committee if you are having problems with your mentee
9) Provide information on further professional contacts as appropriate (i.e. recommending the
appropriate person for technical issues)
10) Providing support to the mentee in preparing their certification process
11) Keep a Mentoring Diary Sheet for each meeting which will be used as evidence whenever
necessary.

Protocols for a mentoring relationship:

The following is a list of general program protocols to be adhered to:

1) Must participate in the meet and greet session, mid-point and end mentor program
evaluation
2) This program is intended to be developmental not external training. Mentors should be
aware of the their own competence and operate within these boundaries
3) Both mentor and mentee should respect each others time and work commitments by not
imposing on each other beyond what would be considered reasonable
4) Either party may dissolve the relationship. Both mentor and mentee must prior to doing so
discuss the matter together first and jointly inform the Mentoring Program Coordinator .
Roles and Responsibilities:

Mentor Roles & Responsibilities

Phase 1: Identifying Roles
Have a clear understanding of why you want to be a mentor
Mentor with a realistic assessment of your skills and experience
Phase 2: Communicating Expectations
Have a clear understanding of your expectations for your mentee
Clearly communicate those expectations
Stay flexible in changing expectations or plans
Create goals with milestones and deliverables
Adapt your feedback to your mentees learning style
Be realistic about setting timelines
Phase 3: Working Together
Advise, dont dictate
Advise on what you know and admit the things you dont know
Give good examples
Recognize your mentees weaknesses and build on his/her strengths
Offer constructive feedback
Evaluate progress
Be your mentees supporter when he/she reaches his/her goals
Be consistent and reliable
Phase 4: Meeting All the Goals
After mentoring is completed, follow up on successes
Provide an evaluation of the experience
Repeat the mentoring process with others

Mentee Roles & Responsibilities

Phase 1: Identifying Roles
Have a clear understanding of why you want to be mentored
Select a Mentor based on criteria relevant to your goals
Phase 2: Communicating Expectations
Have a clear understanding of your expectations for your mentor
Clearly communicate those expectations
Stay flexible in changing expectations or plans
Create goals with milestones and deliverables
Inform your mentor about your preferred learning style
Be realistic about setting timelines
Phase 3: Working Together
Listen and contribute to the conversation
 Understand that your mentor will not have all the answers
Accept constructive feedback
Set time aside for self-reflection
Evaluate progress
Celebrate success
Be consistent and reliable
Phase 4: Meeting All of the Goals
Provide your mentor with updates after the mentoring is completed
Provide an evaluation of the experience
Say thank you

Objectives of mentoring program:

The goal of the mentoring program is to establish a trusting relationship with accountability
and responsibility from the mentor and mentee.

Characteristics of an effective mentor :

1. Accountable and understands authority responsibility

2. Available and committed
3. Willing to learn and attend training
4. An awareness of physical risks inside and outside the unit
5. An ability to confront in love
6. Understands that both mentor and mentee will grow
7. Willing to recruit potential new mentors

Rules for Mentees:

Mentoring is a mutual relationship with responsibilities and accountability on each person.

Understand that not everything is a crisis. Your mentor is prepared to give you another
perspective.

No con-games or manipulation of your mentor. This behavior will prevent your mentor from
developing a relationship that will help you succeed in the world.

Dont expect all problems to be solved quickly. It took you a lifetime to get where you are
today and it will take time to get where you want to be.

Mentor Issues :
 Be faithful in attendance to mentor meetings and debriefings. Your mentee is counting on you
and the debriefings will provide you with ideas.

An offenders vision rarely extends past the gate. You must make them think of the future and
help them plan for it now.

Introduce accountability and responsibility. This will be a key part of their success after
release.

Be patient, build good relationship.

Designing a mentoring program :

1. Design Your Mentoring Program

The starting point for any mentoring program begins with two important questions:
1. Why are you starting this program?
2. What does success look like for participants and the organization?
To answer these questions you will need to dive deep to understand your target audience.
Make sure you understand who they are, where they are, their development needs, and their
key motivations to participate. Translate your vision into SMART objectives: specific,
measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. Objectives provide direction to program
participants, establish program key performance indicators (KPIs), and help organizational
leaders understand why they should offer their support.
Successful mentoring programs offer both structure and flexibility. Structure provides
participants a mentoring workflow to follow and is critical to help participants achieve
productive learning that reaches defined goals. Similarly, flexibility is essential to support
varying individual mentoring needs across specific learning goals, preferences, and learning
style.
Key design decisions include:
Enrollment is it open, application, or invite only?
Mentoring style can be traditional, flash, reverse
Connection type possibly 1:1, group, or project
Connection duration typically weeks or months, or perhaps even just a single
session
Community/social aspects beyond formal mentoring, tracking and reporting needs.
A good idea is to create a program workflow diagram to explain each step of your program.
You can provide details such as key actions, timeframes, support resources, and criteria for
moving to the next phase. Mark areas that will require some flexibility to support user needs.
2. Attract Participants for Your Mentoring
Program:
The best designed mentoring programs wont get far without effective program promotion,
mentor recruitment, and training.
When new mentoring programs are introduced in organizations, there is generally natural
enthusiasm. Yet this enthusiasm doesnt always translate into high participation rates. A
common reason is the absence of effective promotion. Dont assume potential mentors and
mentees understand the benefits. For many, this will be their first opportunity to participate in
mentoring. You will need to convince them that participating is worth their time and effort.
Beyond participants, key leaders and stakeholders will need to be educated on the benefits of
the program and strategic value to the organization.
Consider the needs of mentors. Building a solid base of mentors can be a challenge. It is
important to understand the positive and negative factors that impact mentor participation.
Once you have identified them, look for creative ways to reinforce positive drivers and lower
the hurdles of negative ones throughout the mentoring process. For example, mentors are
often busy people with limited time to spend. How can you help mentors be more efficient
with the time they have to dedicate to mentoring? Also consider recognition and reward
strategies. Formally recognizing mentor involvement can be very motivating and help attract
additional mentors to the program.
Lastly, productive mentoring doesnt just happen. Provide training to mentors and mentees
regarding the programs goals, participant roles, mentoring best practices, and your mentoring
process. Help mentors and mentees clarify their own objectives. The need for training and
guidance doesnt end after the initial orientation. Provide tips and best practices throughout
the mentoring program to help participants stay on track and get the most out of the program.

3. Connect Mentors and Mentees:

A productive mentoring relationship depends on a good match.
Matching is often one of the most challenging aspects of a program. Participants will bring
various competencies, backgrounds, learning styles and needs. A great match for one person
may be a bad match for another.
Matching starts by deciding which type of matching youll offer in your program: self-
matching or admin-matching. Consider giving mentees a say in the matching process by
allowing them to select a particular mentor or submit their top three choices. Self-matching is
administrative light, which in larger programs can be a huge plus.
 For more structured programs, such as large groups of new students at universities, or groups
of new corporate employees, you may want to get the program started by bulk, or admin-
matching. Evaluate various match combinations before finalizing as ensuring quality mentors
for hard- to-match mentees can be challenging.

3 Steps to Successful Mentor Matching

Create user profiles with rich data like gender, college, interests, and job function
Decide on your method: self-matching or admin-matching.

Matching best practices start with a solid profile for all participants (mentors and mentees).
Critical profile elements include development goals, specific topical interests, location,
experiences, and matching preferences. The more you know about your participants, the
better chance your participants will have for a great fit and a happy, productive mentoring
outcome.

4. Guide Mentoring Relationships:

Now that your participants are enrolled, trained, and matched, the real action begins.
It is also where mentoring can get stuck. Left to themselves, many mentorships will take off
and thrive. But some may not. Why? Because mentoring is not typically part of ones daily
routine. Without direction and a plan, the mentoring relationship is vulnerable to losing focus
and momentum. That is why providing some structure and guidance throughout the
mentorship is vital to a successful mentoring program.
One best practice is to ensure all mentorships have goals and action plans. This serves two
purposes. First, it brings focus at the onset, which helps a mentorship get off to a good start.
Second, it adds accountability to accomplish something.
Provide all mentoring relationships with timely and relevant help resources (topical
content, mentoring best practices, etc.) throughout the mentorship. Chunk-sized content
delivered at key points is ideal.
As a mentoring connection progresses, establish checkpoints where mentorships report on
their progress. Even if your organization doesnt choose to formally track the details, just the
act of reporting progress helps mentors and mentees stay productive.
Lastly, have a formal process that brings closure to the mentoring experience. Within this
process, provide an opportunity for both the mentor and mentee to reflect upon what was
learned, discuss next steps for the mentee, and provide feedback on the benefits of the
program and process.
Chronus software makes guiding, or facilitating, your programs mentoring connections
very easy and enables your participants to be highly productive.

5. Measure Your Mentoring Program:

Understanding how the program measures up to expectations may well be the most important
phase of all.
Mentoring is a significant investment when you consider program management,
infrastructure, and the valuable time of participants. Articulating the impact is essential to
secure ongoing funding and support. In addition, the measure phase is also focused on
assessing program health to identify trouble spots and opportunities.
Mentoring programs should be tracked, measured, and assessed at three altitudes: the
program, the mentoring connection, and the individual. To be effective you need the ability to
capture metrics and feedback throughout the program lifecycle.

At the program level, build metrics around defined business objectives. For example, in a
diversity mentoring program you may want to compare promotion rates of program
participants to non-participants. Also track funnel conversion metrics, which show the
progress participants make at each step of the mentoring program starting at enrollment.
Conversion metrics provide essential insight into program health.
For mentoring connections, you want to understand mentorship behavior to identify
roadblocks and opportunities. Common questions you will want to ask are: Is the mentoring
timeframe too long, too short, or just right? Are mentorships getting off to fast starts or
lagging? Are participants leveraging content resources you have provided?
For participants, you want to understand the impact of mentoring in terms of outcomes
while acquiring program feedback. One of the easiest ways to capture outcome and feedback
is through surveys. Ask participants and stakeholders how well the mentoring program met
their goals and the goals of the organization. Also ask them for their ideas for improving the
program

In Conclusion:

Mentoring is an impactful strategy to develop, engage and retain your people. But running an
effective mentoring program goes way beyond just matching people up. For true impact on
your organization, it takes effort, resources, and know-how. While it is no easy task to build a
mentoring program from scratch, following the five step process will put you on the right
path to successfully achieve your organizations learning goals.

Putting It All Together: How the Program Works:

Mentoring During Year One :

Each department appoints a Mentoring Program coordinator for the department, a senior
person. This person will report to the VC about department-based mentor mentee pairs, and
will encourage junior and senior faculty to actively participate in the program.

Information about departmental mentor-mentee pairs will be passed along to the VC . Contact
information about the new students will be kept on file so they can be contacted by the
faculty members about the mentoring program.

Mentoring During Second year onwards :

In the second year, the student will be contacted to join the student Mentoring Program. A
second mentor from outside of the persons department will be assigned to the student. This
career mentor can provide general information about career advancement and development in
the university and will be available to discuss goals, activities, evaluations, and any concerns
of the junior faculty member. Mentor-mentee pairs in this program are encouraged to meet
quarterly. (Note: Mentors/ mentees can request changes in their assigned mentor/mentee at
any time.)

Mentors and mentees will evaluate the program on an annual basis. Department and career
mentors are encouraged to work together with the junior faculty person and with each other.
Mentors and mentees will be matched within departments by the Director of Mentoring.

Frequency of Contact:

Data from the National Center for Educational Statistics indicate that the efficacy of
mentoring is a direct result of the amount of time the mentor/mentee work together.
Specifically, 88% of those who work with mentors one time a week report substantial
improvements to their instructional skills, compared with 36% of protgs who work with
mentors a few times a year. Thus, we encourage frequent contact between mentors and
mentees with department members frequently checking in with mentees.

Activities for Mentor-Mentee Pairs:

Some suggested joint activities for mentors and mentees include:

1. Discuss strategies (i.e. looking for resources and collaborations) for advancement
2. Review student evaluation form

3. Discuss research management strategies

4. Review time management strategies

 5. Provide techniques for managing courses

6. Schedule regular professional development opportunities

Program Evaluation:

Both mentees and mentors are expected to participate in regular evaluations of the
programs effectiveness. We will assess factors such as frequency of contact and the
status of mentoring goals .

The evaluation will include :

1. Quality of information shared

2. Relative comfort level enjoyed by both

3. Quality of the constructive relationship between mentor/ mentee

4. Ongoing quality improvement

5. Degree of rapport established

6. Availability of mentor when needed

Duration of Mentor- Mentee Commitment:

The length of the mentorship commitment set forth in the Mentor Agreement Form will be
four academic years. However, mentors and mentees are free to extend their relationship
indefinitely. Continuing with the same mentee can be considered a career-long support
system. As noted, changes in assignments may also be requested.

Recognition for Mentors:

Each mentor will receive a Certificate of Appreciation at the end of each academic year.

Mentor Checklist:

1. Be sure that your mentee knows how to contact you (e.g., email, telephone, fax, etc.).
Request contact information from your mentee.
2. Introduce yourself by phone, brief letter or email. Invite your mentee to a meeting;
suggest potential topics.

3. Obtain mentees CV prior to the first meeting so that you already know pertinent
professional information.
 4. Set aside about an hour for the first meeting with your mentee.. Use this hour to learn
about other aspects of your mentee. What are his/her hobbies? Share similar
information about yourself.

5. Discuss your expectations and your needs with your mentee. Work with your mentee
on yearly goals for the relationship (meeting time, etc.). Plan to meet at least quarterly
with your mentee.

6. To chart his/her success, help your mentee develop a checklist that you both can
follow.

Mentee Checklist:

Before the meeting with your mentor :

1. Ask yourself What are my goals? How can a mentor assist me in meeting these
goals?
2. Take the initiative. Introduce yourself by phone, brief letter or email. Invite your
mentor to meet; suggest potential topics. Agree on confidentiality and no-fault
termination.

3. Update your own CV.

4. Consider the skill sets that require additional mentoring: What skills do I need to learn
or improve? What do I want to change about my work style? What professional
networks are important?

During the meeting :

1. Discuss your short- and long-term professional goals (e.g., funding, manuscripts,
courses) and work together to develop steps to reach these goals, with a timeline.
2. Determine frequency of meetings. This will vary based on individual needs, but often
occurs once a month, and at least quarterly. The extent of interaction can range from
brief email or phone check-ins to lengthy follow-up meetings.

3. Suggest potential topics for future meetings. (Examples: setting and achieving goals,
managing time effectively in an academic environment, balancing personal and
professional life, negotiating for what you want/need, completing manuscripts, etc.).

After the meeting and throughout the relationship:

1. Establish your own checklist for follow up. Keep an ongoing portfolio of activities &
works in progress. Check your timeline.
2. Re-evaluate the mentoring agreement at least annually