Mentoring can provide tremendous benefits to women in science and engineering programs, as we wrote last month (see "E-Mentoring Inspires Confidence in Women Students").
But what makes a mentoring program likely to achieve such good results?
Structured mentoring programs have been around long enough to produce solid evidence of what works and what doesn’t. Research and experience show that successful programs are grounded in comprehensive planning, assessment, and follow-up. They also provide careful mentor-protégé matching, structured implementation, and ongoing participant training and support. Brought together, these elements can deliver a program that consistently adds value to the academic experience and helps protégés advance in their careers.
Here is a look at the basic elements of successful program, based on research and evaluation of MentorNet programs as well as third-party research:
Adequate planning. Top programs set clear goals and know what they want to accomplish. What resources, such as money, staff, time, and tools, are needed? Remember: programs are only as good as the people in them. The best identify and recruit participants systematically.
Managed expectations. Participants will get the most out of the experience and be less likely to be frustrated or derail if they know what to expect and what’s expected of them. The best programs fully orient participants (both mentors and protégés), clearly communicate program goals, set requirements, and so on. MentorNet, for example, assists participants via online guides and ongoing email communications and encourages mentors and protégés to set expectations for each other.
Careful matching. Ensure that you have a good system for matching mentors’ characteristics and backgrounds with protégés’ preferences and needs. This is especially important in e-mentoring, because participants won’t necessarily share a group or culture. MentorNet’s matching system was developed completely in-house and is continually refined. A recent example of this refinement is the addition in March to allow protégés to view and choose potential mentors or have MentorNet choose for them.
Structured implementation. Structure gives participants the wherewithal to sustain regular interaction over the course of the program. MentorNet, for instance, is highly structured, and works to help protégés follow through on commitments and give mentors a better ability to provide sustained encouragement. Formal exercises, tutorials, and so on help pairs develop, learn, and grow.
Support: coaching and training. Inadequate coaching, training, and follow-up was a main reason many early mentoring programs failed, according to researchers, and it’s easy to underestimate the time and resources these areas require. There are many methods of providing support, including email, phone, or face-to-face meetings; discussion groups and online forums; and web-based tutorials. Examples of MentorNet’s support tools are interactive tutorials that take participants through common experiences; emailing discussion topics to matched pairs on a weekly or biweekly basis; and providing staff assistance to troubleshoot and solve problems.
Training, typically for mentors, generally happens up front and covers general mentoring issues as well as how best to respond to a protégé’s needs. Coaching, on the other hand, should be ongoing and assist participants at a more individual level. For example, it can help revive flagging communications, guide participants through the relationship, or steer them toward new resources.
Community building can be an important aspect of the mentoring relationship that provides ways for participants to share experiences and work through problems. This can happen via face-to-face meetings, online discussion forums, and email lists.
Follow-up and assessment. Consistent assessment and follow-up provide the information needed to improve and refine a mentoring program. Each year, for example, MentorNet gathers and analyzes both qualitative and quantitative data and uses the information to make improvements.
A relationship between two people is the heart of any mentoring endeavor, so success at the individual level also rests on such intangibles as personal chemistry, personality, desire and commitment, life events, and so on. But when all the basic elements are in place, you’ll improve the chances that mentoring relationships will thrive.