Better Mentoring = Better Careers.
Mentoring can give people direct access to experience it can take years to acquire. We design and manage mentoring programmes, train mentors and mentees, and provide one to one mentoring directly. Over the last twenty+ years we have built up an extensive breadth and depth of mentoring experience, delivering national programmes in the public sector, specialist programmes for universities and a wide range of internal mentoring schemes for organisations.
Mentoring is normally a relationship in which somebody with greater, relevant experience helps somebody less experienced to find their way by sharing it. The mentor offers things like guidance, a different perspective, constructive challenge and access to a wider network. The mentee should still take responsibility for their own development throughout the process.
Mentoring and coaching are genuinely different.
Both can deliver real value, and can work well together. Where somebody needs to focus on how they perform now, coaching can be more effective.
Where the requirement is more about longer term, broader development, mentoring may offer a better solution.
A mentor is not there to advise, instruct, manage or tell.
The role is to support, develop, stimulate and challenge, so the mentee reaches their own answers.
Most organisations we work with require support in one or more of the following areas.
Short, practical workshops run before a programme begins. The mentor session covers what mentoring is, the benefits on both sides, managing the process, the skills that make a pairing work and what to do when it does not. The mentee session covers the same ground but from the mentee’s perspective. Both workshops utilise realistic case study type scenarios to support learning, not just theory.
We provide a complete mentoring programme delivery service: clearly establishing and communicating the purpose of the programme, defining success measures, deciding how mentors will be selected and how pairs are matched, writing programme guidelines, briefing everybody involved, training mentors and reviewing progress as the programme runs. Organisations can underestimate the ongoing work required after launch and this can decide whether a programme is successful.
Mentoring support provided directly by us on a commercial basis. Typically six or more sessions over six to twelve months, in person or over Teams. Common areas of support include supporting employees stepping up from team member to team leader, building executive or leadership skills, confidence and presence, managing workload and managing people for the first time.
For organisations looking to run an in-house programme, we can provide training to HR / Learning and Development teams to enable them to deliver programmes effectively. We provide access to mentoring learning materials and help build capability, leaving you to run your own programmes with confidence without dependency on external support.
We have extensive experience in the delivery of mentoring programmes. We have designed and run a number of large scale mentoring programmes at a national and regional level for government agencies and development bodies, along with many different internal schemes for organisations across different sectors and scales. Some examples include:
Developed and managed seven major business to business mentoring initiatives for the oil and gas sector, four in the UK and three jointly between the UK and Norway. Around 200 people took part at executive, board, leader and senior management level.
Developed, managed and delivered a regional business mentoring programme across Manchester and the North West of England, matching around 140 small and medium sized businesses with a business mentor.
Facilitated group mentoring programmes supporting over 100 owner managers of small businesses, covering everything from defining the business offering and setting direction through marketing, sales, recruitment and managing growth.
Mentoring support provided as part of a multi-year, large scale development programme delivered to over 100 companies.
Managing the Women in Technology Mentoring programme.
Delivering programmes and workshops for a range of organisations including oil operators, engineering contractors, education, technology and not-for-profit organisations.
Mentoring programmes can sometimes fail for predictable reasons. Most of these issues can be avoided by getting the design stage right.
Perhaps the most common issue is in relation to a mismatched pairing. Everybody sets off on the journey with enthusiasm, then issues start to arise, meetings slip, and things can grind to a halt. Often, the pairing can be worried about mentioning or dealing with this. So nobody tells the programme manager until it’s too late. Early and regular programme reviews and check-ins can help catch any issues. We normally try and support the pairing to make this work, but will look at revisiting this and actively change out the mentor if this cannot be fixed.
Our mentor and mentee workshops provide examples of realistic scenarios covering these types of situations, from breaking the ice at a first meeting to handling a mismatch, a mentee who wants to offload, or a confidential disclosure a mentor may not be equipped to manage.
In our experience it can be one of the biggest factors in the success or otherwise of a programme. Being good at your job does not automatically make somebody good at mentoring. Common mistakes include: giving advice instead of asking questions, solving the problem rather than helping the person to solve this themselves, or drifting into more of a line management style or approach. A short workshop before the programme can help deal with all of that, and give mentors a well thought through structure, approach and guidelines for the first and subsequent meetings.
It happens, and a well managed programme anticipates this rather than treating it as a failure. It is important that all participants know from the outset that a mismatch is not a failure and that this can happen for a number of different reasons. We explain how to deal with this in our workshops, as if it is left unsaid it usually ends with the relationship “fizzling out” as neither person wants to raise it for fear of this being seen as a failure on either or both of them. Rematching a mentor early on in a programme can be relatively easy and straightforward if issues are flagged up. Rematching six months in, after both have disengaged, is much harder to recover from.
Yes, we have run in person, online and hybrid sessions. Our mentor or mentee workshops typically run to around two hours and can be run online or in person, typically for up to ten people at a time. We have workshops already developed which can be customised to suit your programme, terminology, culture and timescales, or delivered off the shelf as is.
We normally find it is much more effective to have your own HR or learning team manage this if possible, with support from us where needed. We can help design a programme, train mentors and mentees, train your team and hand everything over if needed to manage this in house, so that you are not dependent on an external provider each time the programme runs. Some organisations prefer to outsource elements or all of the management to us.
Whether you are setting up a mentoring programme from scratch, have a programme that has stalled, need your mentors and mentees prepared effectively before you start, or need some mentoring support for one individual, we can help.
Contact us for an exploratory discussion, always on a no obligation basis.