Because mentors are a scarce resource, it’s inevitable that not everyone can be part of a formal mentoring programme at the same time. So it’s important that people who are not selected remain positive about the programme and about their personal development. Here is an example of how you might communicate to potential mentees at (more…)
Mentee Mentor What is your need from mentoring? Help with a technical task Help with a new technical role Help in thinking through and following your career plan Help in developing management capabilities Help settling into or preparing for a new management role What kind of mentoring can you offer? Help with a technical task (more…)
Mentor and mentee matching process The aim of this project is to establish a more reliable set of information, on which matches between mentors and mentees can be made. While a fully automatic process is theoretically possible, it is likely in the great majority of cases that programme managers will want to work with data (more…)
Matching How you will match your programme participants is a key element in the overall programme design and needs to be clearly defined and agreed upfront. It is often the one thing that people will ask most questions about and have the greatest expectations from in your programme and the more transparent you can be (more…)
Summary Selecting participants for your programme can be a challenge. Generally you will be guided by what your programme purpose is. If this is a graduate programme you will have your mentee group identified immediately. This will also aid your thinking in who you might want to approach as mentors as some criteria you might (more…)
Once mentors have some initial experience, they typically want to consolidate and grow their skills. Some of the practical ways programmes meet this need include: There appears to be a direct correlation between this process of continuous development as a mentor and willingness to be a serial mentor. For those, who want to go further (more…)
Summary Levels of training The aim of any training course in mentoring is to equip participants with the skills they will need to be confident, effective and safe in the role in which they are expected to operate. For most organizations, it is convenient to categorize training programmes as: Line manager briefing Nature of (more…)
When Kathy Kram carried out her seminal research into mentoring at the beginning of the 1980s, she focused on a small number (22) of informal mentoring relationships, taking place within a specific cultural context – educated North Americans. She identified a number of themes that recurred in these relationships and, as she herself has readily (more…)
One of the remarkable aspects of mentoring is how extensively researched the topic has been. However, extensively-researched isn’t the same as well-researched. Having had to trawl through hundreds of papers and a fair pile of dissertations for my own current doctoral research, I soon came to echo the thoughts of an anonymous business school faculty (more…)
Questioning the role and value of executive coaching is likely to raise quite a few hackles. But questioning our own practice is a key component of competent coaching. So it was with both anticipation and some discomfort that I began last year to explore the question: “Could leaders and managers be using having a coach (more…)