You already match people, and you are better at it than we are.
Pairing a mentor with a mentee for a year is your craft and the thing you are accredited on, and we do not do it. What we do is the one day your whole cohort is in the same room, which is a different problem - everyone meeting a few people, in a fixed number of rounds, in an afternoon.
“It adds structure but is less intense than speed networking. Especially with a big group, it gives people a sense of purpose and direction.”
Self-selection, inside a formal programme.
The finding that matters most in this field is that assigned mentoring barely registers while self-chosen mentoring does, and that the remedy is to build features of informal mentoring into formal ones.
A day that manufactures choice
A cohort event where people meet several credible others and then decide who to pursue is one way of giving a formal programme the thing informal mentoring has. It is a claim about the format rather than about our matching, and it is the honest version of what we do.
Nobody spends the afternoon with the wrong person
At a cohort launch or a mentoring circle the pairing is usually done the night before, by hand, from a spreadsheet. That works up to a point and the point arrives sooner than people expect. Above about thirty in the room the number of possible pairings stops being something a person can hold.
A wider network than one mentor can be
The research moved some time ago from one mentor to a developmental network, on the basis that no single person supplies everything a mentee needs. The cohort day is the one moment in your calendar when that network can be widened on purpose rather than by chance.
Something to put in the programme evaluation
You will have a record of what every participant said they were looking for, what they could offer and who they were introduced to. That is useful at the mid-point review, and useful again when you are asked to justify the programme.
One day of your programme, not the whole of it.
Two boxes when they sign up for the day
What they are stuck on, and what they have done that someone else might learn from. Mentors and mentees both answer, because on the day most people are a bit of each.
Everyone gets their list
Three names, where to find them and a sentence on why. Mentees get people who have done the thing they are trying to do. Mentors get people they can actually help, which is what keeps a mentor coming back.
You get the write-up
Who wanted what, who offered what, and where the two did not line up. If eleven mentees want help with something and one mentor can give it, you would rather know in March than in October.
What we do not claim.
This buyer has read the papers, so here is the short version of what the evidence will and will not support.
- Not longer-lasting matches. What the research attributes match longevity to is the ongoing support and training after the pairing, not the quality of the introduction.
- Not lower drop-out. Same reason. Nothing in that literature points at how the two people first met.
- Not values or attitudes. Deep-level similarity is the strongest predictor of whether two people get on, and you cannot read it off a registration form. We would not pretend otherwise.
Priced per cohort event.
Most programmes run one or two of these a year, so it is priced per event by the number of people in the room, and it is free under fifty. If you run several cohorts there is an annual package.
What programme managers ask first.
Ask us the hard question first.
Tell us how your cohort day runs now and we will tell you whether this would change it. Sometimes the answer is that it would not.
Make the cohort day worth the travel.
Try it on one launch event and see what your cohort asks for. It would be great to talk it through before you commit to anything.
Talk to us