Mentors and mentees run into passages or transitions in their mentoring relationships. For example, once the pair has built the relationship and established a certain amount of trust, the two will move into the longer phase of implementing the mentee’s development activities. Later, when it’s time, the two will transition from that phase into closing the formal mentoring part of their relationship.

Mentoring programs and initiatives also go through phases, and as a mentoring leader you’ll help to facilitate these transitions. Here are several times you might guide your organization and its members from one set of experiences to the next.

1. Initial Ideas to Serious Planning

One of the most crucial transitions occurs after you and your enthusiastic group generate your first set of creative potential ideas for intentional mentoring in your organization. Everyone’s excited, ideas abound, and expectations are high. Everyone wants mentoring to happen. NOW.

Assuming that your eventual goal is to create a widescale “mentoring culture,” it will make sense to have an overall vision and plan to get there. You’ll therefore spend time in this transition phase getting people to document their ideas, developing a master plan, and getting agreement on what to do first.

The Mentoring Group recommends you think big and plan long term, AND that you start somewhere with a smaller version of what you’d like to accomplish down the road. The next two transitions below will help you test your initial ideas.

2. Initial Planning to Beta Testing

So-called beta testing is the first rough test you give to a new idea or design. Sucj testing sometimes is avoided. It’s commonly conducted in organizations that that have the habit of carefully testing new products. For example, in Microsoft Corporation’s Mentor Program, the planning group decided to select a small group of people on which to test the potential mentoring recruitment, training, and matching process. Microsoft does beta testing with new software in order to identify and solve problems, so it made logical sense to follow the same process with the mentoring initiative.

You can conduct a beta test on a relatively small number (compared to your eventual full-program number) of participants and condense the activities into a few weeks of testing. Here’s where you try draft versions of everything. Once the obvious “bugs” are found and manifestations are made in your design, procedures, and materials, you’ll be ready for the next phase: pilot testing.

3. Beta Testing to Pilot Testing

Most organizations skip the beta test and go right to a pilot test. This involves more participants and a longer try-out period. While the beta may run for a few weeks, the pilot should more closely simulate the actual final mentoring “intervention” and thus run for a few months. The more your pilot resembles your final initiative, the better, since that’s why you’re testing it in the first place. You want to be able to predict what will really happen when you launch your big plans.

4. Pilot Testing to Field Testing

This transition step is seldom done on a consistent basis with planned mentoring in business and industry. It’s usually required (and proves beneficial) in federally or state funded mentoring initiatives for youths.

With field testing, you further enlarge your test population and usually test in diverse geographical areas. If you have a very large organization and the support to conduct a field test, it’s worth doing.

5. Implementing on a Large Scale

This transition is large and the most challenging of all. In a large organization, it can take years to accomplish. Once you’ve analyzed data from your pilot (and/or field) test, you spend this time making final decisions about your full-fledged initiative. You tighten up your procedures, write them down, and find and train champions to do the implementing. You add things you didn’t think of earlier and determine the nuances that will ensure that your approach fits the wide variety of people, divisions, geographies, time zones, and other differences throughout your organization.

Your pilot program was small and quite manageable. Implementing mentoring on a larger scale, especially organization wide, requires considerably more energy, time, persuading, helpers, checkpoints, and budget. You won’t have thoroughly tested everything, so at times you’ll just have to make the leap and continue to make improvements as you go. Some of your helpers who loved the initial creative idea and planning phases may want to drop out rather than continue to help you with the more predictable implementation tasks. New people who know little about planned mentoring will emerge with their creative ideas and expectations.

5. Handling Transitions within Your Ongoing Program/Initiative

Once your mentoring program or initiative is launched and rolling along, you’ll continue to handle transitions. For each round of programs within the larger initiative, you’ll be announcing, recruiting, and planning for participants and activities. Similarly, mentors and mentees will be starting and ending their relationships and will need your guidance as they step through their relationship transitions. And eventually the time will come for you to transition yourself out of your role and pass the baton to your successor.

Write us about the transitions you’re experiencing and any best practices you can offer. For more ideas on mentoring, see our Products and Archive. Consider ordering The Mentoring Coordinator’s Guide, which is full of practical ideas and worksheets to help you succeed with your mentoring initiative.