How do you hang onto your brightest young talent and prepare them to lead? Simple: Recruit your more experienced employees to help teach and guide them. Not only can a mentoring program boost your bench strength for top jobs, research proves that people who learn more on the job are far less likely to quit, says Terri Scandura, a University of Miami management professor. “It makes the job more interesting to be learning from a senior person,” she says.

The benefits don’t stop with proteges: People who mentor often are more productive, better socialized, and less stressed, Scandura says. They also tend to develop a loyal network of supporters, gather valuable perspective from younger employees, and gain insight into other parts of the business. Here’s how IBM, Nationwide Insurance, and other companies create lasting programs that pay off.

Decide Why You Want a Mentor Program

Goal: Set your program up to succeed by defining goals and involving top execs.

The vast majority of mentoring programs fail because businesses don’t know what they want to get out of the effort. “When you have fuzzy program goals, you have fuzzy outcomes,” says Dr. Lois J. Zachary, author of “Creating a Mentoring Culture.” Some businesses start a program to help newcomers adjust; others use it as a recruitment tool or a method of leadership grooming. IBM started its program to build knowledge, foster learning, and connect people in a company with 386,000 employees. The culture of mentorship runs so deep that every IBM employee is either being mentored, mentoring others, or doing both. “A lot of our people work virtually, and mentoring can erase geographic and business-unit borders,” says Sheila Forte-Trammell, who manages IBM’s mentoring programs.

Businesses should ensure that top management is involved in the program and in its inception, otherwise it won’t get the attention and enthusiasm it needs to become part of the business culture. “You should have their understanding and their support. That is absolutely one of the keys,” says Barry Arbuckle, CEO of MemorialCare Medical Centers, a six-hospital system in Southern California that uses mentoring as part of its development program for middle managers. The company’s chief operating officer, not human resources executives, runs the company’s mentoring and leadership program.

Essential Ingredients

Three Ways to Make Mentoring Part of Company Culture

Brand the program. Market it like you would a product, with success stories and messages from the CEO. Stress what it means to the company, such as a more resilient workforce, more creativity, and more knowledge sharing. IBM emphasizes a “give back, reach back, and pull through” culture, where mentoring is an expectation of all employees and vital for collaboration, innovation, and maintaining institutional knowledge.

Provide access to education. Hold seminars on mentoring and host networking events that encourage people to find their own mentors. IBM offers mentoring teleconferences, panel discussions led by executives, and even “speed mentoring” sessions, similar to speed dating.

Make it everyone’s job. Make being a protege part of a bigger leadership training program and being a mentor a requirement for some kinds of job advancement. Emphasize what’s in it for the employee: continued learning, new skills, visibility, insight into business strategies and priorities. Be sure managers recognize mentoring accomplishments and allow time for the relationships.

Pair Up Proteges and Mentors

Goal: Create profiles and match people according to your goals.

Identify how many people should be mentored and who they will be. Will it be new recruits, managers, or promising young leaders? Next, create a similar profile for ideal mentors. If you hope to use the program to aid recruitment, seek out those who like teaching younger people. If your goal is to groom the next generation of leaders, then team them up with top-level managers. People who have been on the protege side before often make good mentors, says Dawn Plimmer, the associate vice president of learning and performance at Nationwide Insurance.

How to match up promising junior talent with mentors? You can ask managers to set up matches, have human resources do it randomly, let people pick each other, or have them fill out forms and match them based on skill sets or goals. IBM relies on an online database that lets employees search for their own mentors.

At Nationwide, human resource executives found themselves over-thinking the matches according to technical discipline and personality. Now, they’ve made it much more random, and it works better. “We were trying to engineer the relationships,” Plimmer says. “There is such a wide spectrum of things you are bringing to that relationship, and we were only looking at a couple of dimensions.”

Larger businesses often encourage matches between people from different parts of the country or from different operations of the business. That removes the relationship from the traditional management chain and paves the way for cross-company knowledge exchange. For some people, the separation fosters trust more easily than a relationship between people who see each other every day. Even with no ulterior motives, Forte-Trammell says, a perfectly sincere manager can set up an apprentice for failure by blurring the distinction between assigned tasks and mentored activities. “It’s penalty-free speaking,” says Sharon Sadowski, an IBM product manager in Chicago who talks monthly with her mentor, Lindsay-Rae McIntyre, a human resources manager in Rochester, Minn.

Hot Tip

What’s in It for Mentors?

Plan to offer some sort of recognition to those who volunteer as mentors by providing an appreciation luncheon, giving small gifts, or incorporating mentoring into their annual reviews. Companies should also remind mentors that the benefit can go both ways — whether it’s understanding a different piece of the business or learning how to use Facebook. IBM’s McIntyre says her protege, Sadowski, shares great information about working in the Chicago operation and dealing directly with clients, along with nuggets about what she’s learned in her MBA program. “That’s the best part of being a mentor,” McIntyre says.