Are you ready to celebrate mentoring this National Mentoring Month 2024?
Whether you’re new to mentoring or a seasoned mentor program leader, now’s the perfect time to put mentoring front and centre in your organisation. National Mentoring Month is a dedicated month that’s all about the different types of mentoring – so let’s get planning!
As program leaders, managers and team members, you can raise awareness of the power of mentoring to achieve goals by getting involved in National Mentoring Month celebrations. This includes events, comms campaigns and taking the time to reflect on your own mentoring journey.
What is National Mentoring Month?
National Mentoring Month is a widespread campaign to spread awareness around the importance of mentoring in society, as well as celebrate its positive impact. It runs every January and includes Thank Your Mentor day on the 26th.
This can be a great way to launch both your team and company towards a successful year through mentorship. By focusing on key areas of internal improvement facilitated by individual self-development, effective goal setting & identifying areas for growth. You can scale and monitor this more efficiently throughout the year.
National Mentoring Month’s 3 key goals are:
- To raise awareness of all the different types of mentoring
- To inspire more people to become mentors, particularly younger people
- To advance the growth of mentoring by encouraging organisations to run mentoring programs for their people
Why celebrate National Mentoring Month 2023 with your business?
Yearly, more organisations are becoming aware of National Mentoring Month celebrations and how it can benefit not only the development of their business but the lives of their employees.
What started as a US youth mentoring movement, has snowballed into a global celebration of the benefits of mentoring in all areas of society, with many organisations, universities, and charities getting involved.
Returning to work this January, many employees will struggle with motivation and getting back into the work routine.
However, National Mentoring Month is an opportunity for organisations to unite their teams and kickstart the year – not just through goal setting, but also by addressing obstacles or key areas of concern hindering both employee and company development. Working collaboratively on setting a foundation for a prosperous year ahead.
Mentoring has benefits across the board: from building trust and psychological safety, to helping to onboard, retain and develop your people. There are so many reasons to get involved in mentoring, this January really is the perfect time!
How can you get involved with National Mentoring Month?
Whether you are a mentor, mentee, program leader or advocate it’s the perfect time to join the conversation. If you don’t yet have a mentorship program in your business then this is the perfect time to introduce it! Schedule a call with our team, to discuss how to set up the right mentoring program for your people.
If you already have an active mentoring program in your organisation, there are many ways to celebrate your fantastic mentors and mentees, as well as reinvigorate your program. This includes running a mentoring event to celebrate and promote your program.
Here are a few of our suggestions on what you can do this January:
- Start a mentoring program at work
- Find yourself a mentor
- Become a mentor
- Share your mentoring story
- Participate in Thank Your Mentor Day
- Keep up the momentum
Continue reading below to learn more…
1. Start a mentoring program at work
No matter what kind of organisation you work in, mentoring can be used for a wide range of purposes.
So if you want to make a real impact, you need to establish a mentoring program within your company. Mentoring has so many positive uses in the workplace, including leadership training, diversity and inclusion, onboarding, graduate retention, and more.
On a more general note – everybody wants to learn, develop and grow in their careers. By formalising and promoting that in a mentoring program, you will end up helping a lot of people and creating a better company culture.
The great thing is 89% of mentees go on to become mentors in the future, meaning any mentoring efforts you implement now will have a long-lasting impact.
Read our stats on mentoring in the workplace so you can approach senior leaders in your business and pitch your mentoring program with some killer numbers to back it up!
Ready to start a mentoring program? Download our detailed guide to help you get started:
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2. Find yourself a mentor
The start of a new year is all about setting goals and thinking about what you want to achieve. With January fittingly being National Mentoring Month, it’s a great opportunity to decide to get a mentor for the year ahead.
Mentoring is an incredible way of increasing your self-awareness, career opportunities and confidence. Finding yourself a mentor is therefore one of the most effective ways to take responsibility for your personal development.
How to get a mentor:
- Determine why you want a mentor: what are your goals?
- Identify potential mentors in your network: who do you admire? Who could help you?
- Put in the groundwork – do your research, reach out, and be proactive
- Ask to meet to get their advice about a specific topic
- When you meet, assess their experience, characteristics and the chemistry between you to see if they could be a good fit
- Ask them to be your mentor!
For more detail, check out our full guide: How To Find A Great Mentor
Remember, mentoring is not a one-way relationship, but a partnership. The more effort you put in, the more you’ll get out of it.
And you never know, there’s a lot your mentor could learn from you too!
3. Become a mentor
Being a mentor is a highly rewarding privilege. You have the ability to help somebody else realise their potential, achieve their goals and become the person they want to be.
As much as the reward of being a mentor is a feeling of ‘giving back’, it also has many additional benefits. Mentors experience higher levels of job satisfaction and fulfilment, as well as the opportunity to develop their leadership and management skills.
Harvard Business Review found mentoring to be good for mental health, with mentors experiencing less stress and anxiety at work, and describing their job as more meaningful than those who did not mentor.
A great way to get involved with National Mentoring Month is by becoming a mentor. The easiest way to do this is by speaking to your company and finding out if they have any mentoring schemes you can sign up to.
Using mentoring software such as Guider allows new mentors to sign up to their organisation’s mentoring program in a matter of minutes and input the skills and knowledge they feel they can share.
Think you’re not ready? Check out our top characteristics of a mentor, maybe we can change your mind!
4. Share a mentoring story
Never underestimate the power of word of mouth. If you’d like to get involved with National Mentoring Month, but perhaps aren’t in a position to get into a mentoring relationship, why not spread awareness of the good mentoring can do from personal experience?
We’ve all been exposed to mentoring in some shape or form in our lives, even if we’ve never had an official or formal ‘mentor’. Maybe a teacher at school, a colleague or a relative took particular care to teach or support you in some way?
These experiences of mentorship at a young age can be extremely formative, helping shape our lives and mindsets. By sharing these stories with others, you may be the person that inspires somebody else to become a mentor or seek out a mentor – it’s extremely valuable!
We would also love to hear how mentoring has impacted your life or career! Tweet us or drop us a message
5. Thank Your Mentor Day
National Mentoring Month concludes with an official #ThankYourMentor Day on January 26th 2023!
The whole month is an opportunity to reflect on mentoring and what it means for you, so it’s only right that the last day is an opportunity to thank those who have mentored you or the fantastic mentors in your organisation’s program.
On January 26th, remember to convey your thanks to the mentors in your life and encourage those around you to do the same!
One way to do this is to give your mentor a shout-out on LinkedIn or Twitter using the hashtag #ThankYourMentor or even post a more detailed story of the impact they’ve had on your life on LinkedIn. This hashtag will receive a lot of traction on social media channels on the day, so make sure you don’t miss out.
Equally, if you and/or your mentor are not social media people, send them a card or a gift to show your appreciation for their support. This will only strengthen your relationship, and serve as a reminder to them why being a mentor is a great thing to do!
IDEA: if you’re responsible for running mentoring programs or initiatives within your organisation, why not host a Thank Your Mentor Day event to get everyone in the mentoring community together to celebrate the relationships that have formed? It’s a great way to keep people engaged, and hopefully inspire a new generation of mentees to become mentors!
6. Keeping Up the Momentum
At the start of a new year, typically the habit is to create a list of goals & bucket lists or even form some S.M.A.R.T. goals. But admittedly, it is quite easy to lose commitment to your goals.
However, mentorship can provide added guidance that can nurture and direct organisations more clearly towards achieving goals.
Mentoring is not a one-time activity, but rather a long-lasting investment. It can be something you revisit moving forward as new goals & challenges enter your path. It is something innate in the knowledge-seeking part of us, as we pursue the act of exchange with the people that surround us, becoming mentors and mentees, to develop smarter ways to grow as an individual, organisation and society.
The biggest reason mentoring schemes fail is that they lose momentum – remember to use National Mentoring Month to spread awareness or launch a program, but then keep promoting the value throughout the year.
If you are a champion, leader or expert looking to develop your team through mentorship, Guider can efficiently scale this for you by making the experience as seamless and organised as possible to help you achieve your goals sooner rather than later.
Get in touch with the team to see how you can keep the new year momentum going for the rest of the year!
