IT staffing and services company Dexian designed its Mentor Development Program to help mentors become proficient in developing new recruiters and salespeople. The company has found that quality mentors directly influence retention, while poor mentorship is cited in exit interviews as a signficant reason when people resign.
As a result, Mentor Development is a critical support program for Dexian’s Develop and Advance (D&A) Career Path. It fosters daily relationships and trust, enabling mentees to achieve success, happiness, and ownership of their goals. Mentees are empowered as business partners, enhancing their professional and personal confidence.
Program Details
The Mentor Development Program develops new leaders and is a crucial step in the D&A Career Path for aspiring managers. Based on feedback from successful mentors and leaders, the curriculum includes empathy, coaching skills, CliftonStrengths talent assessments, and emotional intelligence. The blended learning approach combines online content with weekly Zoom sessions for role-playing and concept application. The final requirement is a Zoom-recorded coaching session, graded by Dexian’s coaching team using a detailed rubric.
Dexian implemented a flipped classroom approach in its Mentor Development Program. It provides program participants with an online curriculum where they watch videos and complete eLearning coursework in preparation for a weekly group meeting where they apply the content they learned earlier in the week. A facilitator from Dexian’s coaching and development team leads the discussion and poses a scenario topic during the group meeting. Topics are centered around difficult conversations, giving feedback, emotional intelligence, etc. As a result of the flipped classroom approach, program participants are more engaged in their discussions and can apply their learned content for deeper understanding and collaboration. This approach also allows participants to learn at their own pace and take responsibility for their learning by controlling when and how much content they view at a time.
Reinforcement activities include:
- Facilitated virtual/in-person coaching
- Reports on pre-work completion follow-up
- Learning boosts and completion reports
- Coaching role-play sessions
- Setting up meetings and using the assessment tool to score how the office is doing
- Post-session group and individual coaching sessions that address areas of weakness identified in the final role-play assessments
Results
Based on observational assessments from the offices, the behaviors of coaching, empathy, and the power of questions vs. telling are displayed in 100 percent of the offices that have participants who have been certified by this program.
Mentoring also has decreased turnover, with new hire recruiting turnover at less than 11 percent. Some 95 percent of Dexian’s entry-level salespeople are mentored by graduates of the Mentor Development Program. These mentees have less turnover than the company’s baseline turnover target and significantly less turnover than the industry average.
