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Mentoring
Give your people the tools they need to achieve more – and your Leaders opportunities to share their expertise
Mentoring Comes From Within
Every Leader should want to see their people perform well – and to do it without being micro-managed.
Great Leaders share their knowledge and expertise, guiding and supporting the development of their whole team, and giving them the tools they need to be capable of excellence – but what’s the best way to guarantee that, and be the best Leader for your team?
Learning and Development should be an integral part of your workplace culture – but the way that development functions can vary; every organisation has a development strategy – but which works best? More importantly – which works best for you?
Training? Formal or informal learning? Coaching?
The options can seem endless – and terms like ‘training’, ‘learning’ and ‘development’ are often used interchangeably, so it’s probably helpful to start by clarifying the differences, so you can decide which is the best choice for your people.
Training is an organisation-led activity, designed to improve performance with standardised learning experiences. Every new team member goes through the same basic training, so the essentials are covered – and success depends on the person doing the training.
Even the most experienced and successful people might struggle to train others – because being an expert doesn’t always translate into teaching someone else how to be – so this standardised approach, reliant on your existing people, might be a bit…lacking.
Learning, on the other hand, is a person-led experience. Workplace learning should be shaped by the needs and preferences of the individual, and the specific role they are there to do. Everyone brings their own skills, experience and knowledge to your team – so a ‘one-size-fits-all’ training process might miss key factors, or seem patronising to employees who already know what’s being taught!
The gap between training and learning – or, rather, between knowing which is needed and when – is why most organisations typically see such a poor return on investment, even when they spend big with their budget for traditional training programmes.
The organisation sets goals for what should be learned, but the learners themselves need help to extract the personalised development they need, from the limited learning opportunities available. Off-the-shelf programmes are usually too generic, standardised for ‘the lowest common denominator’, and rarely designed to meet the more specific, personal goals high achievers and winning teams share.
This is why one of the most important aspects of any Learning or Development programme we design includes hand-picking Personal Development Mentors from within your own team. Someone who knows your organisation, your long-term and short-term goals, and your people.
What is – and what isn’t – mentoring?
Fundamentally, mentoring means bridging gaps in experience. What the mentor knows, and their mentee needs to know. Rather than a difference in status, where a mentor has any kind of organisational authority over their mentee, it’s a relationship created to share knowledge, creating an equal playing field where every member of the team can thrive, with the tools and information they all need to perform at their best.
Wisdom is just as vital as knowledge, when it comes to successful workplace mentoring. It should be a relationship, in which the mentor nurtures, encourages, teaches and supports the development of their mentee (or mentees!) – and that relationship should be one of mutual respect. A dynamic in which the mentor responds to the mentee’s individual needs, rather than covering a broader, standardised ‘training programme’. Trying to cover all your bases doesn’t give you excellence, it just waters down your ambitions, and homogenous mediocrity in your team.
It’s vital to remember that mentoring can only work when both parties are there on an equal footing, and have shared goals. If the mentor seeks to be admired or agreed with at all times, or feels they have nothing to learn from their mentee, the balance of power will get in the way of progress.
Great mentors have many qualities, but the most fundamental is a genuine interest in – and enthusiasm for – developing others.
What makes a Great Mentor?
No matter what kind of Development programme you’re looking for, the success of your learning relies on the commitment of your people – and especially those selected to act as Mentors – embedding new learning into your team’s day-to-day.
So who should you choose to be a Mentor, and what traits do they need?
- a broad range of skills and knowledge, and a willingness to pass them on
- an acute understanding of the organisation, your culture and the outcomes you’re aiming for as a team
- time and willingness to dedicate to the process, and to the relationship they need with their mentees, even if problems arise
- well-developed interpersonal skills and the patience to work within an often unstructured relationship
- the ability to command respect – and a willingness to offer it in return
- a willingness to learn – from both the process and the mentee – is also invaluable!
What are the main responsibilities of Mentors?
The main purpose of good Mentors is to offer support, reinforcing the processes of personal development outlined in whichever learning programme you’re approaching.
Planning, learning, learning transfer and applying new learning in the workplace.
We know that it’s actually the transfer of learning that’s often missed, in a significant proportion of L&D – in fact, recent statistics state that as little as 12% of learning is transferred.
This means that 88% of people who complete any L&D at work are failing to make real, actionable changes back from the classroom. That’s a staggering statistic!
Although the mentoring process, and the particular focus of your mentees, will vary according to their individual needs, a Personal Development Mentor will help you to see those changes. Real change. Lasting change.
Your Mentors, picked from within your own teams, should be responsible for:
- helping the mentee(s) to interpret and understand feedback from psychometric, peer and facilitator feedback, and put it to good use in developing their self-awareness
- identifying the mentee’s personal development priorities, and making sure they are aligned them with organisational goals
- applying learning and concepts from the programme to real workplace challenges
- planning the mentee’s personal development ‘journey’, and supporting them through the process, checking in and offering guidance or support if they struggle
- identifying the most relevant options from the available formal learning experiences
- identifying and organising relevant workplace learning experiences
- creating a programme of informal learning (e.g. assignments, projects, mentoring by a senior colleagues, volunteering)
- preparing the mentee(s) for formal and informal learning experiences, and receiving a subsequent de-brief
- helping the mentee(s) to apply their new learning, and the improved capabilities they gain during both formal and informal learning experiences.
How do Mentors help?
Personal Development Mentors aren’t there to teach – their role is to help their mentees put the learning, gained from formal L&D programmes, into practice. A mentor helps your people to practice newly learned skills and behaviours, embedding them into their routines until change is not only understood but undertaken.
It’s hard to give specific examples, though it’s a question we are asked a lot – because we’ve been in the industry for well over three decades. The breadth of topics we cover in our Leadership and Management Development Programmes is, potentially, infinite!
Having said that, and consider that there are differences for each client, each having their own unique concerns to face, there are some consistent themes we would encourage your Mentors to focus on. These include:
- Managing performance: motivating your team, giving effective feedback, applying coaching skills, effective delegation, and improving development opportunities for junior staff
- Constructive influencing: stakeholder management, managing upwards, communicating for greater influence, and more effective peer networking
- Leadership: demonstrating Situational Leadership, holding courageous conversations, understanding your impact on others, and developing empathetic approaches to Leadership
- Responding to change: developing personal resilience, dealing with ambiguity, building confidence in new areas
- Self-development: using self-knowledge to improve self-management; workload management and work-life balance; goal attainment and planning; self-reflection and review; mindfulness in the workplace
To find out more about how placing a Personal Development Mentor can help you – especially to avoid wasting your investment on costly training programmes that see no measurable improvements – give us a call.
Our programmes, and the selection of Mentors from within your existing team, guarantee that you will see a return on your investment: genuine, impactful change, and improvements in the performance of your whole team.
We can help – not by merely delivering more training, but by leveraging the training your Leaders, Managers and teams are already receiving, to make sure that it ‘sticks’, and that you see the benefits, improvements and future you want – for your whole organisation, and every future goal you strive for.
How? Just ASK!