Starting a new employee development program can be tough. Often, it can feel like you’re pushing a boulder up a steep hill, resisting the pushback at every step. As a manager, it is your job to lookout for your employees. Initiating a mentoring program enables the development and advancement of employees, but it also can face opposition from other ranking members in the organization. To make a convincing case for employee learning and growth, you need to know what you’re up against.
Here are the top three objections from the C-Suite when creating a formal mentoring program, and how to address them.
We Have Other Pressing Priorities
In today’s world, companies are pulled in many different directions in order to stay competitive and relevant—not just to their customers, but also to their employees as well. With so many topics vying for C-suite attention, the phrase “not right now” can be a common one for senior leaders to fall back on.
But making mentoring a top priority is vital for an organization. Without the proper focus on employees, businesses can fall victim to excessive turnover and employee disengagement—two things that can have long-term financial repercussions on an organization. A Gallup study found that 70 percent of employees are disengaged. Further, this disengagement is costing U.S. employers up $605 billion a year in productivity.
Meanwhile, mentoring programs are a proven strategy to improve employee engagement and learning within an organization. In fact, of those who participated in a company’s mentoring program, 78 percent felt more engaged with the company. With engagement comes improved productivity, lower turnover, and increased customer focus. Presenting a fact-based case for a mentoring program in your organization with stats on factors like attrition rate, employee satisfaction rate, and the cost of replacing employee is more likely to pique and retain the interest of C-suite members. Connecting the consequences of overlooking this opportunity to the company’s bottom line creates a compelling argument for why mentoring should be a top strategy.
We Don’t Need a Formal Program
Many leaders assume informal mentorship can be just as effective and available as formal, so why spend the time and effort creating a company-wide program. While informal mentorship has its benefits, it is not always as accessible for all employees.
Catalyst research shows that a lack of mentoring opportunities is a frequent barrier to advancement for women and people of color. They summed up findings in the following statement: “Senior leaders—individuals whose experiences and positions provide a wellspring for sage advice and introductions to influential others—often choose to mentor those who ‘look like’ themselves. And because white men dominate top positions in most organizations, by definition women and people of color lose out.”
What’s more, informal mentoring programs make it hard to keep track of progress and impact. Without a properly designed structure and plan for tracking metrics, an informal program’s effectiveness often remains unknown. A lack of data can make it hard to know if the program is doing any good for participants, and leaves outcomes up to hoping and wishing. A formal program better aggregates data for organizations striving to make better, data-driven decisions.
We Don’t Have the Resources
You will inevitably run into the tried-and-true objection of limited resources. This is often the case for many organizations, as companies try to remain agile and lean. With budgets and staff stretched thin, it can seem too big a burden to devote time and effort to a new initiative.
To make the case for a formal mentoring program, you must present a solution that matches the bandwidth of your organization. Understand the constraints, and propose a program with a size, staff and workload your organization can handle. This could be a small pilot program of selected mentors and mentees to participate over a six- to 12-month period. It’s a simple place to start, building proof of concept for other senior leaders to evaluate. Keeping things small and simple in the beginning can minimize the load of a mentoring program in the minds of the C-suite team.
Building an initial program also can help you track data for a smaller number of matches, in order to measure impact on a smaller scale. This allows you to work out any kinks before rolling out to a larger audience. Once you have this experience under your belt, you can make the argument for expanding your mentoring program to more participants, employee populations, or even other locations. Because mentoring enables employees to efficiently learn from each other, your workforce becomes more agile—a competitive advantage you don’t want to pass up. As your program expands, you’ll need to grow the program support, which might require additional staff, system structure or even software, scaling the program for more impact potential.
By preparing to encounter these objections, you can setup yourself up to succeed in starting a formal mentoring program for the benefit of employee engagement and workplace development. Thinking through your argument from the mindset of the C-suite will help you put the benefits to the organization at the forefront of the discussion. Well thought out points, data, and examples will help you convince senior leaders of the importance of mentoring now, and in your company’s future.
