Mentoring

What is Mentoring?

Mentoring  is where the mentor, who often has a more senior role or longer tenure in a role, provides guidance and insight to an individual, the mentee, to help build their capability, knowledge or experience,  to bridge a specific development gap that has been identified.

How do you get a mentor?

• As part of a graduate programme - we work with you to design your internal graduate programme, a key element of which will include assigning a mentor to each graduate. The purpose of the mentor is to provide the graduates with access to a senior leader within the organisation who can provide them with a more strategic view of how the organisation operates and tie all the moving parts back to the Mission, Vision and Strategy, thus building their breadth of knowledge about the functioning of the organisation
• As part of Talent Development -  we work with you to design a mentoring programme whereby by both Mentors and Mentees sign up to be part of the programme to help bridge specific development gaps, often as part of a wider talent development and succession planning strategy. We provide training to both Mentors and Mentees on how to get the best from the mentoring relationship. We provide a matching service whereby we collect the knowledge, capabilities and experience of the mentors and match Mentees to the Mentor who is based aligned to their development needs. 
• As part of an Individual Development Plan - you may identify the benefit of being mentored by someone more senior, either in your existing work place or externally, as being a key development need. E.g. you're looking to broaden your knowledge of a specific industry, manufacturing process, professional service etc. And you can look to identify and approach a specific role model to mentor you, or indeed ask your line manager to recommend and approach a mentor on your behalf

Benefits of mentoring to the Mentee

• Mentee gets access to a more senior member of the organisation, helping them to navigate some of the intricacies of working in an organisation and at the same time getting to benefit of the mentors knowledge skills and abilities that have got them to the position they are in today.
• It's a great opportunity for the mentee to consider the many and varied approaches to developing their career by understanding the path that got the mentor to where they are today.
• It's an opportunity to learn about a part of the business which may be outside the mentee's own area of technical specialism and so understand the interactions,  inter-dependencies and symbiotic relationships among the various departments and functions within an organisation.

Benefits of mentoring to the Mentor

• The mentoring relationship is a great opportunity for the mentor to learn about  what is happening "at the coal face", what are the prevailing opportunities and challenges for those who deliver the products and services.
• The mentor gets to learn about what's new and emerging in the area of specialism of the mentee, thus keeping their own industry knowledge current.
• The mentor gets to "give back" by helping the mentee to learn from the mentors experiences and challenges. How they have progressed through their career and overcome adversity and setbacks on the way, which ultimately have made them the leader they are today.