Measuring the Impact of Your Mentoring Program
“Is Your Mentoring Program Successful?”
Trust me, at some point, someone will ask you, “Is the mentoring program successful?” If you don’t monitor your results, you won’t know where you can improve or if you’re succeeding.
It’s easy to get your mentoring program up and running, pat yourself on the back, and think you’re done. But if you do, you’ve missed a critical step. If your goal is to provide effective mentoring that changes each mentee’s life for the better—and this should be your goal—then you must confirm that the mentoring is effective through program evaluation and metrics.
In the case of mentoring programs, you can’t know whether or not it's successful unless success is defined and tracked. If you don’t monitor results, you’ll have no idea if you are succeeding. It’s like me trying to improve my golf game. If I never keep score, I might be much happier in the short term, but I’ll never know if I’m getting better.
Measure what matters to ensure great results, just like you would with any other important piece of your business. This will help you generate both short-term wins and long-term improvement.
Measure your program based on the actionable metrics you established upfront.
Evaluate: What’s working? What’s not?
Access: What do you still need to know?
Your mentoring program must show a real impact. If not, it becomes a nice-to-have initiative, and as with most nice-to-have initiatives, it will soon fade away and become a used-to-have.
Without correlating activity to impact, mentoring programs are frequently deemed unnecessary and eliminated long before their real value is realized. You don’t want this to happen with your mentoring program.
Measure Outcomes at Least Once a Year
Whether capturing results and feedback is accomplished through surveys, performance reviews, or other methods, data is vital to the progression and scalability of your program. Measurement data provides you the opportunity to review, revise, and continuously improve your mentoring program.
Some of the methods you may plan to use to evaluate your program could include:
Surveys
Performance reviews
Informally polling
Interviewing participants
Or, other means
I suggest measuring mid-term, at least during the first year. This will allow you to:
Recognize, collect, and communicate short-term wins, and
Identify trouble spots and opportunities early enough to do something about them.
Communicate Short-Term Wins Early and Often
Short-Term Wins
These are all the small successes that add up to lasting results. Short-term wins are typically in the form of an anecdote or a positive quote from a participant (mentor or mentee) that you can share with your organization's leadership and other program participants. Recognize, collect, and communicate short-term wins – early and often – to track progress and energize your army of volunteers.
By measuring early, you should be able to gauge what is and isn’t working—that way, you can make needed changes and adjustments.
It’s critical to evaluate the right metrics tied to your objectives. Make sure the right metrics, built around your defined business objectives, are being measured. According to Ben Yoskovitz, the co-author of the book Lean Analytics,
“Analytics isn't about reporting for the sake of reporting;
it's about tracking progress. And not just aimless progress,
but progress towards something actionable
you're trying to accomplish.”
(Croll and Yoskovitz)
Use Quantitative and Qualitative Data
For your mentoring program, you should assess a mix of both quantitative and qualitative data. Measuring a blend of both quantitative and qualitative data will provide a rich and meaningful picture of your program.
To put it in simple terms:
Quantitative data is the numbers. Numbers are easy to track, measure, trend over time, and understand, like sports scores and restaurant star ratings. Quantitative data is objective and precise and answers the “What” questions.
Qualitative data is the words. It’s not measured easily; it’s what you learn from interviews and discussions. Qualitative data is subjective and imprecise and answers the “How and Why” questions. While sometimes messy, quotes and excerpts of phrases help paint a picture for you.
If you already have a mentoring program up and running, take a look at the metrics you are using. If a dimension isn’t actionable, and you can’t do anything to make it better, ask yourself why you are tracking it. What should you track instead?
No matter how much we love the idea of creating a mentoring program, you simply have to be able to back it up with results. Mentoring is a substantial investment when you consider program groundwork and participants' valuable time. Telling the impact story is essential to secure ongoing funding and long-term support.
The impact story is told through evidence. We show that it’s working, that positive results are flowing in, and that human lives are being changed for the better. I am reminded of one of my favorite quotes, often attributed to W. Edwards Deming,
“In God we trust. All others must bring data.”
For a more in-depth dive into measuring the effectiveness of your mentoring program, we cover this topic in much more detail and provide examples and best practices in the “High-Impact Mentoring” program online course.
This article was adapted from my book "High-Impact Mentoring: A Practical Guide to Creating Value in Other People's Lives."
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