Posted by eporter on May 29, 2025
A Guide to Establishing Relationships with Mentors as a Mentoring Program Staff Member
Though a mentoring relationship is defined as a partnership between a mentor and a mentee, mentoring program staff understand better than anyone that there is a lot that goes on “behind the scenes” to create strong, long-lasting matches. From recruiting and screening mentors to orchestrating trainings to monitoring match progress to supporting matches and match members, mentoring program staff play an integral part in helping youth gain mentoring experiences that will positively impact them.
However, mentoring program staff’s contributions to their program should not be limited to the day-to-day operations of their program. Like mentors, program staff can uphold the core of successful mentoring programs: supportive relationships. Below, we discuss why it is worthwhile for program staff to develop relationships with volunteer mentors involved in their program and how staff can create alliances with mentors.
Why is it important for program staff to establish relationships with mentors?
Providing support and creating a relationship with a mentee is not an easy task, so mentors may feel more equipped to establish their mentoring relationships when they feel supported by a staff member that they can trust and confide in. In fact, research indicates that mentors feel that their relationship with their mentee is closer whenever they feel they have been supported and prepared by their program’s staff members.1 Mentors also provide a more positive assessment of their mentoring relationship when they have built an “alliance” with staff in their program through program practices such as mentor orientations and check-in meetings with staff.2 Alternatively, mentoring relationships may be more likely to end early when mentors have a negative relationship with program staff and when they have received inconsistent communication or support from staff.3
Relationships between mentoring program staff members and mentors are especially important for specific matches. For example, when a mentee has experienced trauma or environmental stressors, when a mentor is an adolescent, and when a mentor’s relationships with their mentee’s family is weak, establishing a relationship with the mentor involved in the match may promote their mentoring relationship’s length and quality.4
How should program staff approach a relationship with a mentor?
The terms “monitoring” and “support” are commonly used in the field of youth mentoring to describe mentoring program staff’s role with mentors. These terms may sound like the extent of staff’s interactions with mentors is providing them with resources and watching them closely; however, high quality monitoring and support involves regularly meeting with mentors and establishing trust and reliability. MENTOR’s Elements of Effective Practice for Mentoring suggests that program staff have both frequent, short support check-ins as well as less frequent, lengthier support meetings with mentors.4 Regardless of the frequency and length of staff check-ins with mentors, the quality of staff-mentor relationships and content of staff’s support is the most important.
Here are some tips to help guide program staff’s relationships with mentors and ways to approach communication with mentors:
To read more of Mentoring Central’s tips for mentoring program staff and access resources to help you establish and maintain a successful mentoring program, sign up for our newsletter by completing the form at https://irtinc.us/#newsletter.