Creating a mentoring program from scratch is no easy task. On the surface, it seems deceptively simple: A) enroll participants, B) match mentors and mentees, C) measure engagement (somehow), and D) get accolades for your amazing program success. But as we’ve covered in multiple previous blog posts, including our guide on how to start a mentoring program, there are many, many steps involved and a large amount of legwork that should happen before you even start to enroll participants. To better guarantee program and relationship success, HR and talent development leaders should take a careful, strategic approach when building mentorship programs that streamline the approach using a mentoring action plan.
A mentoring action plan is a strategic document framework for your mentoring program design. It looks at the mentoring program across all development points, starting with pre-launch needs. Your mentorship action plan will end with maintenance goals, e.g., how you plan to continually measure program and relationship success and how you plan to adjust your program design as needed in the future.
At a high level, your mentoring action plan will answer some or all of the following questions:
And on and on. There are probably dozens of questions you’ll ask along the way as you create your mentoring program. Each of these questions, and more broadly, each step in the program development process, will need an action plan that you can follow from start to finish so that you stay on task.
This is designed to help you framework through the important questions and steps you’ll have in creating and managing your programs. Here, you’ll find the exact steps to create a mentoring action plan that will work for each part of the process. You can then replicate that same template design whenever you need to tackle another part of the process.
Your mentoring action plan should be unique to your organization, but you can take a fairly simple approach. We recommend that your mentoring action plan include all of the following sections, at a minimum:
Again, adjust as you see fit and in a way that makes sense for your organization. As most of us know, most companies and even most internal teams have a certain “way of doing things.” If that’s true at your company, make sure your mentorship action plan aligns with that general style.
In his book, The Soul of the Firm, William Pollard, an American Physicist and founder of the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, wrote that “Information is a source of learning. But unless it is organized, processed, and available to the right people in a decision-making format, it is a burden, not a benefit.”
The same will be true of any mentoring plan that you create and how you ultimately organize your plans for yourself. Disorganization results in confusion and leads to inconsistent results. So, to get a consistent result out of your mentorship plans, we’ll start at the beginning: your project folders.
Whether your company uses Microsoft or Google, you should have access to a file management system. Create a separate folder in your file management system called “Mentoring Action Plans”. This is where you’ll house all of your action plans. Since we’ll be using the same general plan template, each one will look the same but contain different information.
You may even want to break these up into additional subfolders. For example, you could create three folders around the different phases of launching a mentoring program:
Do you need to categorize these by years? Only if you feel like it. Generally speaking, your action plans should be broadly designed to allow you to repurpose them later. You may want to put details like years on the document’s title but not necessarily as a subfolder itself. But I wouldn’t stop you, all the same. Just make sure your structure is intuitive to yourself or anyone else who might be working with you.
(Hot tip: Don’t forget to set your share settings so that people who need these documents can access them!)
Now comes the fun part: writing your first mentoring action plan template!
As we noted above, you could ask many questions that need a strategy to solve. But, it’s easier to categorize your action plans around the phases: pre-launch, mid-launch, and post-launch.
Again, these are very general. But you need to start broadly before you get granular. The mentoring action plan aims to have a replicable approach so you can more quickly get granular when you need to, and then execute.
With that in mind, let’s draft a mentoring action plan template. Then, we’ll walk through how you can adapt it to different use cases.
Title : [Title of this Action Plan, e.g., “Getting Executive Buy-in for Mentoring Program”]
Phase : [Pre-launch / Mid-launch / Post-launch]
Objective : [Specific goal you aim to achieve with this action plan, e.g., “Secure executive approval and support for the mentoring program”]
Key Stakeholders: [List of key stakeholders involved, e.g., “CEO, COO, HR Director”]
Tasks:
[Additional tasks as necessary]
Resources Required : [List of resources needed, e.g., “Budget estimate, Meeting room, Projector”]
Budget: [Detailed budget breakdown, if applicable]
Marketing and Promotion (if applicable) : [Strategies for promoting the program internally, e.g., “Internal Newsletter, Company Intranet Post”]
Measurement and Evaluation
Timeline: [Outline of key milestones and deadlines]
Notes: [Any additional notes, assumptions, risks or dependencies]
Approval: Approved by: [Name/Title]
Date: [Approval Date]
There are a few essential reminders with this template that are fairly consistent with any template you might use:
Now that we have a template, let’s take a look at what this template might look like with filled in details for a very common use case: Choosing the right matching option.
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