Going Past the Well-Intentions: Setting Up a Formal Mentoring Program

Improving Organizational Mentoring (Mentoring Part 3)

When I went to college, I chose to attend a small, new writing program at USC’s (Fight on!) storied film school, and one of the things that excited me about the program was that all of the writing students would be assigned mentors—established screenwriters—at the very beginning of their studies.

Eighteen and still able to count how many days I’d been a college student, I was thrilled and terrified when I called the mentor at the appointed time—the first professional writer I would ever speak to. But as soon as I said my name, “my mentor” curtly informed me that they didn’t believe that there should be a writing program for undergraduates¹, so I shouldn’t be getting that Bachelors, and they had no interest in meeting me or helping me. There may have been a few minutes of halted, painfully polite conversation after that, but I admit I sort of blacked out after hearing their first words.

The following day, I informed the program head what had transpired. She replied that she was well aware of “my mentor’s,” view, but she’d thought I could change the writer’s mind. So I was a disappointment—apparently not as brilliant as the program had expected. My first “test” at film school, and I had failed.

Decades later, it still hurts.

It wasn’t until I was writing this series on mentoring that I started rethinking what happened. Had I really failed so badly?

Here are some of the lessons from the organizational mentoring research that have me thinking that it wasn’t all me, in hopes of helping leaders who want to either create mentoring programs or encourage those engaging in informal mentoring. (Which again, please do!)

Quick Shots

• According to a 2023 LinkedIn survey of 1,579 learning and development professionals around the world,  mentoring was their #1 priority.

  Apparently they have a lot of work to do: According to that same report,

• 74% of employees said their organizations did not challenge them to learn new skills

• and 86% said that their organizations had not encouraged them to create a career development plan.