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Chandler French
Dr. Christa Teston
English 4567S
4 May 2015
Constructing Quality Mentorship Programs
ABSTRACT
Mentorship has become an increasingly prominent feature of many professional and nonprofit
organizations because of the proven benefits they confer to the mentees. However, it can be
difficult to convince successful individuals to enter into a mentorship partnership as a mentor. I
have done research in the following paper on how mentorship programs might better attract
suitable individuals to get involved and give back; and how nonprofit programs like the
Womens Leadership Councils E3 initiative might make better use of their mentor-mentee
partnerships to benefit all participants. This paper proposes solutions such as organizational
appeals to potential volunteers by highlighting the benefits that mentorship affords to the mentors
in addition to the mentees, as well as recommending the incorporation of informal mentorship
techniques in terms of participant input into the matching process to better identify compatible
mentors and mentees for partnership.
Keywords
Mentorship (mentor, mentee), volunteering, nonprofit engagement
1. Introduction
Mentorship has become a token feature of quality professional development programs, both on
the individual and organizational levels (Allen, Eby, and Lentz 567). Mentorship programs in the
modern sense are a relatively new phenomenon of the 20th-century with the explosion of urban,
industrialized centers in America (DuBois 15). In the last few decades, though, such programs,
both formal and informal, have increasingly gained prominence in the landscape of career
development agendas, despite their effectiveness not being explicitly supported with scientific
data (DuBois 20). The effectiveness of mentorship is generally assumed from the myriad of
personal accounts of its positive effects, as well as its foundations in psychological principles
(Allen, Eby, and Lentz 570). Nevertheless, many organizations have begun implementing
mentorship programs, with varying degrees of success. There are many obstacles facing any
mentorship program- not the least of which is creating a program that is compelling enough to
convince individuals to act as mentors. While a significant amount of scholarship can be found
on the benefits on the mentee side of such partnerships, the benefits of involvement for mentors
is much less thoroughly explored and highlighted when recruiting volunteers (Allen 123).
Beyond recruitment, organizations implementing mentorship programs face the obstacle of
astutely matching mentors with mentees to promote mutually beneficial partnerships.
2. Background

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While conducting my own interviews with members of the E3 initiative of United Ways
Womens Leadership Council, I found that a few factors had an impact of the individual
successes or failures of mentorship relationships. One of the first factors was the perceived
relationship between the occupation of the mentor and the future career goals of the mentee.
Mercy Otieno spoke during her interview about her partnership with her mentor Alice Palmer.
Alice was working as an attorney at the time that she was matched with Mercy, an aspiring IT
professional. Mercy expressed her original concern upon being matched that her mentor did not
work in the same job arena as she was pursuing. Another concern came from Trae Booker who
mentioned that having a mentor who was younger than her contributed to a sense of disconnect
that may have hindered some of the potential benefits from their partnership from taking their
full effect.
3. Solutions
Much research has been done on the benefits of working with a mentor for people attempting to
advance themselves in an organization or along their career paths (Allen 123). However, the
benefits that mentorship offers to its mentors are equally important, and highlighting those
benefits could be critical to attracting new individuals to volunteer for mentor partnerships.
Volunteering in general has been shown to have positive effects on the mental dispositions of
those who participate (Wilson 198). The decision for individuals to participate as mentors often
comes down to the perceived relationship between costs vs. benefits of participating. According
to Tammy Allens article on Mentoring Relationships from the Perspective of the Mentor,
benefits to those in mentor roles can be diverse and significant, ranging from improved job
attitudes, to relational job learning wherein a mentor comes to better understand the context of
their job within a greater organizational whole, and many more. If an individual feels that the
program will require more time, energy, resources, and so on, then it offers in return to its
mentors, then they are less likely to participate (Allen 127). My recommendation to the Womens
Leadership Council and other organization attempting to motivate successful individuals to join
their programs as mentors is to advocate for the program by highlighting the many benefits of
participation, as well as making attempts to streamline the mentorship process so that it demands
the least amount of costs to its participants as possible. A program with a clear-cut mission and
defined guidelines for their partnerships will have more success attracting mentors because they
will not feel that they will have to put in extra time and energy to develop a curriculum or
strategy for the partnership. Clearly delineating goals of the mentorship program offers
specificity and still leaves room for individual partnerships exceed to minimum guidelines of the
program.

Once enough volunteers for the mentor role of a particular program are recruited, the challenge
for an organization such as the Womens Leadership Council becomes how to best make use of
such an influential element of their programming as the mentorship feature is. There are
numerous theories concerning the most effective ways of pairing mentors with mentees. An
organization like the Womens Leaderships Council must determine which theory best fits within

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the affordances of that particular organization, in terms of their mission and resources. The right
pairing of participants is a critical factor in the success or failure of any mentorship program, and
as such, I believe it is worth taking time to evaluate carefully and, if possible, taking into
consideration the input of both mentor and mentee. Mentor partnerships being decided by third
parties outside of the individuals involved in the mentorship tend to not foster compatibility or
liking between participants because they tend to focus solely on the basis of job function, not
taking into account factors of mutual liking or differences in characteristics (Allen, Eby, and
Lentz 568). By contrast, I advocate a process of selection where both mentor and mentee have
input into their pairing; so that the foundations of their partnership might be better suited to their
specific needs- whether that be career advice necessitating common career ground, emotional
and psychological support fostered by mutual liking and identification, or some combination of
both. By giving participants a voice in the selection process, both parties might feel more
invested in the partnership initially, and the mentorship program might be able to avoid some of
the issues I uncovered in my interviews by establishing expectations as far as career similarities
and age-relationships prior to assigning partners.

Works Cited

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Allen, Tammy D., Eby, Lillian T., and Lentz, Elizabeth. Mentorship Behaviors and Mentorship
Quality Associated with Formal Mentorship Programs: Closing the Gap Between
Research and Practice. Journal of Applied Psychology Vol. 91, No. 3 (2006) : 567-578.
Web. 15 April 2015.
Allen, Tammy D.. Mentoring Relationships From the Perspective of the Mentor. (2007) : 123147. Web. 18 April 2015.
Booker, Trae. Personal Interview. 8 April 2015.
DuBois, David L. "Mentoring in Historical Perspective." Handbook of Youth Mentoring.
Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 2005. 15-20. Print.
Otieno, Mercy. Personal Interview. 30 March 2015
Wilson, J. "Volunteerism Research: A Review Essay." Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly
41.2 (2012): 176-212. Web. 18 April 2015.