Matt and I met while we were working at the Boston Consulting Group, an unusual workplace that gets a number of things really right. They rank Top 5 on Glassdoor every year for best places to work. The best thing there is the culture of 'non-evaluative' mentoring. It was common to grab a coffee on a weekly basis with a senior colleague outside your team, talk through what strengths you want to develop, and that conversation would somehow eventually translate into a project together where you worked specifically on those areas. It's the reason why we felt our 'personal growth rate' really took off - someone was always aware of your goals.
That got us thinking about whether the experience could be replicable at other companies too, and that's why we started Together.
We learned that a lot of companies have tried to run mentoring programs but the experience for employees wasn't great. Examples: Someone picked your match for you, and it wasn't a good fit; your match left the company and no one on the HR team even knew; you had a few sessions but had no clue what to talk about / no sense of progress against any goals; as an HR person, you had no visibility into whether the program was working or not
Through Together, any employee can voluntarily sign up to be part of their company's mentoring program. You can sign up to be a mentor, mentee or both - we've even had VPs enjoy the experience as a mentee. Once you fill out your mentoring profile, the magic is in the learning experience that is personalized just for you:
As a mentee, you get a curated list of the top 5 people at your company who signed up and can help you reach your goals. You can be part of one or multiple programs at the same time that focus on different career checkpoints, such as "new manager" or "internship" tracks. With that comes special agendas and content to work through with your mentor/mentee You can track progress to your goals and look back through your personal session history with mentees/mentors - and if things aren't going as planned, an admin might even proactively reach out to you and see if they can tweak who you're working with
Many companies run mentoring programs today, but they largely fall flat. That's why companies like Disney Studios ask us to help them relaunch in a new and more impactful way.
What has been your mentoring experience at work? I'd love to hear about what worked and what didn't! What would you have liked to have? We'd love ideas for how an app like ours could support the mentoring experience for everyone involved. If youβre interested in launching Together at your workplace, [let us know!](https://www.togetherplatform.com/join-list).
by Andrey
Azimov