Mentoring

Design

How will you ensure your programme is set up for success?

Designing a mentoring programme that aligns to your culture, people, vision and objectives - this is a core starting point to ensuring maximum success. Our specialist consultancy team can advise on good practice and possibilities when designing a programme.

Mentoring at every level – programme and individual relationships, start with creating good foundations to build on. We will work with you to develop your overall mentoring strategy and approach. At the outset and at a programme level – success is related to key areas that you will need to define, some of these are:

• Stakeholder buy in
• Clear purpose and objectives
• Current expectations
• Evaluation
• Matching criteria

We can help you by working with you to scope out these areas in line with your desired objectives and outcomes.

Launch and Communications

How are you going to ensure that people sit up and take notice of your new mentoring initiative and want to get involved in your programme?

Part of setting up your programme up for success is getting the right message out to your organisation and getting the right people involved. Some key issues are:

• Setting the appropriate expectations of the programme
• Ensuring people know the purpose and objectives of the programme
• Letting people know the benefits to them
• Clarity around how mentoring will fit with other developmental activities

We can support you in this with:

• Writing communication materials
• Designing HTML campaigns
• Advice around mentor and mentee competencies to aid recruitment
• Designing recruitment forms
• Running lunch and learn sessions to engage and inform potential participants

Training

How will you ensure both your mentors and mentees understand how mentoring will work at your organisation and that they have the skills to do this effectively?

By equipping your mentors and mentees with a sound understanding of:

• What mentoring is
• The benefits and challenges
• Their roles and responsibilities
• How to manage the process
• Skills, techniques and tools to do this effectively

We can work closely with you to design bespoke training that incorporates all elements of best practice but also allows for any specific focus required for your programme. We are adaptable around duration, content, depth, focus and numbers.

We can also provide:

• 1:1 training for Senior Executives - we have found that one to one “mentor sessions” with your senior colleagues and a CA Consultant represents an effective means to explore their mentoring experiences and to provide them with tailored learning while fitting around busy schedules
• Briefing sessions for Line Managers to ensure they are aware of how mentoring will work for their direct reports and can support the process positively
• HR Team or HRBP briefings – often the first point of contact for enquiries about mentoring we find that ensuring this team are aware of the benefits of mentoring and of how it will work in the organisation means that they are able to support and advise people and be ambassadors for mentoring within the organisation

All our training is delivered in a coaching and mentoring style with a focus on it being highly participative and interactive.

Support

Inspiring and training your participants is a great start, but how will you ensure their enthusiasm is maintained and developed?

Initial training is rarely enough to give mentors more than a basic level of competence and confidence. Experience of thousands of programmes has shown that participants both want and need access to continued expert guidance on how to do the role and develop their skills and that there is huge benefit in sharing experiences with peers.

There are also often very specific challenges that are faced within relationships which are:

• Lack of depth in conversations
• Matching issues
• Relationship droop

We can help provide support around these issues through providing:

• Manuals around how to be a great mentor/mentee
• External programme coordination – if internal people resource is an issue we can act as the external coordinator of the programme and become the first point of contact to support participant queries and issues and to keep in regular touch with all involved
• Facilitating review sessions for mentors and mentees
• Delivering advanced techniques sessions for mentors

Or you can take a look at our online offering ...

Supervision

How will you ensure your mentors are supported and are behaving ethically?

The coaching profession has long embraced the concept of regular supervision from a trained expert to support their practice, help them with challenges and to provide ethical support. This is a relatively new area for mentoring but highly relevant to ensure good practice and to provide support around:

• Successes and challenges
• Further skills input and to explore further relevant techniques
• Mentoring the mentor
• Reflection on practice
• Ethical issues
• Share experiences
• Collation of organisational themes that mentors observe

We can support your mentors by providing group or individual supervision with one of our senior consultants. This will ensure that your mentors are supported, momentum is maintained, and that mentoring relationships and conversations are developing.

Evaluation

How will you inform the broader business that your mentoring programme is delivering value and has met its agreed objectives?

Not setting some clear objectives at the outset and continually evaluating your programme against these is a missed opportunity.

We can support the evaluation process in various ways:

• Mentoring Dynamics Survey (MDS) system, this is our in-house developed system which provides light touch control of your evaluation process. Once all initial data is entered the online system manages the process and produces reports. This can be a simple pulse check survey to be used for programmes that have come to a close or a 3 point evaluation process which would need to be set up at the start of your programme and allows for formative feedback to be gathered
• Designing bespoke surveys  - this would be circulated via email and all feedback managed by CA, this data is then analysed and then a report and recommendations are provided
• Facilitated focus groups – CA would design and support focus group sessions and provide full reporting – this is a good way to gather rich data and also enables peer group support
• 1:1 telecons with all participants via semi-structured interviews with full analysis, report and recommendations – this provides very rich data as the format allows for deeper exploration of issues

Train the Trainer

How will you roll your programme out to wider numbers without relying on external support?

Our ethos at CA is that we share our learning and empower our customers to take ownership of their programmes.

We do this by offering various train the trainer programmes.

Areas cover:

• Delivery of our standard mentor and mentee training
• Design and manage a mentoring programme – we run this as an open public course or can deliver this as a bespoke in-house programme

Or we can design bespoke train the trainer sessions with a focus on developing HR Team members so that they are fully prepared in how to coach and support mentors and mentees to develop their skills and overcome problems on a one to one basis based closely around your specific programme requirements.

ISMPE (International Standards for Mentoring Programmes in Employment)

Is it important for you and your organisation to be able to demonstrate that the programme is well-designed, well-managed and contributing significantly to the development of the participants and the effectiveness of your organisation?

Launched in 2003, the ISMPE are supervised by a global Advisory Board whose role is to ensure that the standards are kept up-to-date and to approve the appointment of accredited assessors, who examine mentoring programmes against the standards.

The ISMPE make it possible to assess your programme against a highly reliable set of benchmarks and good practice. ISMPE assessment will enable to you to:

• Identify where to make improvements to the programme
• Assure mentors and mentees that they will be part of a quality, best practice programme
• Enable your internal team to gain affirmation that they are supporting and leading a best practice programme

We can support you by working with you to ensure your programme is fully prepared for the assessment process.
 

Online Mentoring and Coaching Platforms

We have recently been developing online mentoring and coaching spaces/platforms so that organisations have a core platform to share information, provide online training, materials and case studies on mentoring.

This enables organisations to provide support in a non directive, light touch way.

We have found that this works particularly well for large dispersed organisations where they are looking for support, consistency and broad reach or for organisations that have a less formal approach to mentoring. Read More