Page 11 – ART OF MENTORING

Guide to Virtual Mentoring

Virtual mentoring – much better than “the best we can do…”

A best-practice guide to virtual mentoring

Art of Mentoring is a 100% virtual organisation – our employees are spread along the Australian east coast from Brisbane to Devonport, and for us, working from different locations and collaborating virtually is business-as-usual. Our clients are spread all around the world, with programs spanning Australia, New Zealand, Asia, Europe and the UK.

Virtual mentoring, or distance mentoring, can be surprisingly effective, even though it is not necessarily everyone’s first choice. Our Managing Director, Melissa, has written before about the art of virtual mentoring – the pros and cons of electronic communication, and the need for program managers to design a mentoring program with these in mind.

But how does virtual mentoring feel for participants? What are the advantages and disadvantages for individuals, and how do we grasp this new virtual world with both hands?

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing the Art of Mentoring 2019 Mentor of the Year, Tim, and his Mentee, Lou, and found that their virtual mentoring method was key to the success of their work together.

Now I have to say up front that Tim and Lou were lucky enough to meet face-to-face, just once, at the beginning of their relationship, when a family holiday brought Tim to within an hour’s drive of Lou’s home town. Having a friendly coffee together certainly got them off to a good start, but it’s what they did next that made it extraordinary.

In their first couple of communications, Tim and Lou talked openly about the challenges that a long-distance relationship might pose, and they decided they’d meet on Skype using webcams – as awkward as it seemed it might be, they found it wasn’t too hard to let their guard down a little and work through the awkward initial phase together.

But after a couple of meetings, something still wasn’t right. They weren’t getting to the nub of the issues during their conversations, spending much of their time trying to understand where each other was coming from but rarely moving forward to new understandings, and they were getting to the end of 90 minutes with topics left to discuss. They decided to implement a preparation process – the Mentee would send an email about a week in advance with 4 or 5 topics or questions for discussion as well as a little background to her current view or dilemma. The Mentor took a couple of days to think through his answer, and sent a reply email for her to contemplate for a couple of days before their scheduled call.

When they started their facetime call, they already had their teeth firmly in the conversation! They had an understanding of each other’s position, and had articulated their own, and had the chance to think about where the conversation might go and what questions they might ask the other.

Why did this work so well?

Because they had an early, open and constructive conversation about how they would work together, this team entered their first skype call with a positive and collaborative mindset.

Because they “took stock” after a few meetings, they identified a need to try something different, and went into problem-solving to come up with a new way of working together.

Their new solution took advantage of the benefits of both email (time and space to think and formulate a response, freedom to read and respond when best suited them, avoiding distraction and apparent differences) and face-to-face conversations (non-verbal cues, spontaneous and interactive). Their separation in distance and time – when it suited them – became an opportunity rather than a hindrance, and was easily forgotten when they connected in cyberspace!

Here are some simple pointers on how to make a virtual mentoring connection powerful, many of which were employed by Tim and Lou:

Agree up-front how the virtual nature of the relationship will work. What medium or suite of media will you use? Experiment until you find what works best for you both – some people prefer video connection, others prefer phone or email/ messaging. How often will you connect and what is a reasonable response time to a message or email?
If you can’t connect using a visual medium, exchange photos so you each imagine what the other looks like every time you connect.
Don’t forget to re-establish the human connection at the beginning of a call, message or email – don’t get down to work too quickly.
Allow what might seem like awkward pauses in a phone conversation – the other person may just be thinking deeply and not ready to reply. Silence can be a precious gift that provides a chance for the speaker to arrange their thoughts or work out their own solutions before they talk.
Have a clear agenda for each call and agree the focus of the conversation at the beginning. Really effective mentees send an agenda ahead of time with pertinent background. Some useful questions for mentors to ask include:
1. What is the issue you’d like to explore?
2. Why is it important to you? Why now?
3. What do you genuinely know? What do you think you know? What do you feel?
4. How can I help you? Are you looking for a different perspective or do you just what to bounce ideas around?
Remember to be fully present – connecting online offers plenty of distractions. Turn off alerts from other apps so you can listen and give full attention to your partner.
Email communication needs enough detail for the partner to understand and ask pertinent questions but not so much information that they drown in it.
Review and take stock even more frequently than you would in a face-to-face mentoring relationship. Evaluate, every few times you connect, how the relationship is working and what could make it even more effective.

With these thoughts in mind, and a collaborative problem-solving approach, every mentoring partnership can find its own way of working that defies our preconceptions about virtual connection. Successful mentoring partners put as much effort into creating and nurturing the relationship as they do addressing the mentoring content, and what better skillset to master in the new virtual world?

© Gina Meibusch 2020

Case Study – Department of Primary Industries NSW

Department of Primary Industries NSW, Mentoring Program

Increasing Scientists’ Skills and Confidence to become Science Leaders

In 2016, management at the NSW Department of Primary Industries investigated options for developing and sustaining a strong leadership pipeline of research scientists to underpin the growth, sustainability and biosecurity of primary industries in NSW. The Department recognises that science and technology underpins the achievement of stronger primary industries through the 2019-23 strategic plan.

“The sustainability of our Department’s science was a strategic concern to us, and we needed to find a way to build a strong pipeline of science leaders. The risk to our department was not having enough qualified scientists to take the lead and keep our research on par with the world and at the cutting edge of applied science in Australia. We discovered a formal Mentoring program was what we needed; scientists learning from other scientists” said Dr Martin Blumenthal, Manager, Science Excellence, Chief Scientist Branch.

In the last two decades, science-related fields have had difficulty attracting students, despite a steadily growing university cohort. For the Department, this has translated into fewer research scientists overall and even fewer senior scientists available to guide, mentor and support new scientists into senior roles.

Another contributing factor to the lack of natural mentoring, was that scientists within NSW are located in multiple, dispersed regional areas, in varying and often, limited numbers.

Fewer scientists and their geographical dispersion within NSW were hampering the natural pairing of experienced scientists with those less experienced into informal mentoring pairs.

There has tended not to be a strong culture of mentoring within DPI compared to, say, what has generally developed within the university sector (Lee et al. 2007).

Call for a formal mentoring program

To tackle these issues, Dr Blumenthal and the Chief Scientific Officer decided NSW DPI needed a formal mentoring program to link senior research scientists with less experienced scientists, to ensure mentoring occurred and achieved the goals of the department. The aim of the mentoring program was to support scientists in their own field and develop up and coming scientists.

It was thought that developing scientists needed guidance from senior research scientists in two key areas:

How to publish high quality research regularly to maintain their credibility.
How to increase their network in order to get research projects off the ground, as well as join other projects in progress.

Recommendation brings Art of Mentoring to the table

When Dr Blumenthal asked his colleague Jane Latimer if she knew anyone who could run a mentoring program, Jane recommended Art of Mentoring. Jane had previously run a successful mentoring program with Melissa Richardson, the Director of Art of Mentoring at the Department of Planning many years prior, and Jane was happy to recommend her company.

Mentoring program achieves strong championship within senior levels

Beginning in August 2016, DPI embarked on an annual program of 7–8 month structured mentoring programs for scientists with the core objective to increase researchers’ skills and confidence to become science leaders.

Additional objectives specific to each mentee included:

An opportunity for mentees to discuss career goals and aspirations with a scientist whose career they admire.
An opportunity to reflect on professional challenges and achievements.
Personal and professional development gained from problem solving and constructive guidance.

It was hoped the program would provide mentors with satisfaction from helping a more junior scientist succeed and contribute to the future success of primary industries research and development in NSW.

The program quickly achieved strong championship within the senior levels of the department with Chief Scientific Officer Dr Philip Wright, the key sponsor of the program, regularly attending program events.

88 participants access best practice mentoring framework within three years

“The team at Art of Mentoring has helped our participants apply and onboard into the program with marketing resources, one step sign-up forms, and an easy-to-use platform. The platform’s matching algorithm guided matching decisions. Having Art of Mentoring manage the program for us has reduced the administrative burden of managing a program of this size. We’ve been pleased with how smoothly everything went, right from the start,” said Dr Blumenthal.

Each year the program has been open to 20 mentoring pairs and 88 participants have completed the program over three years. The mentoring pairs set their own agenda, goals and frequency of meetings, with the Mentee driving the relationship. Resources such as videos, guides and email content are provided to help and encourage best practice mentoring skills. However the structure of the program is flexible to meet different participant engagement styles.

Mentoring Pair: Matt and Stephen

Just as Iron sharpens iron, one man sharpens another

Mentor: Matt Broadhurst, Senior Principal Research Scientist with DPI Fisheries at Coffs Harbour

Mentee: Stephen Johnson, Ecologist and Professional Officer with DPI Biosecurity at Orange

Matt and Stephen first met over the phone.The Mentoring collaboration

During a couple of face-to-face meetings Matt and Stephen discussed objectives and realistic outcomes, including:

Career planning and how to navigate departmental obstacles.
The need to prioritise publishing empirical science to evoke defensible environmental/resource management within departmental objectives.

As a mentee, Stephen experienced:

A very different perspective on a scientific career within the department.
To focus on completing one step at a time, and realising it isn’t a race, but rather a ‘journey’ (to quote ‘The Voice’).
The realisation a mentor can help one to see the hope within.

As a mentor, Matt learned a few new things as well:

‘Weeds’ are, in fact, an important component of government-funded research.
Everyone has a perspective on their own work that warrants equal consideration.

Mentors don’t have an answer to everything, but via subtle suggestions we can prompt solutions within the brain of the mentee.

Mentoring Pair 2: Ashley and Pip

When Dr Pip Brock’s role as a Leader at DPI was restructured to a Research Officer, she welcomed the opportunity to discuss her next steps with her Mentor, Dr Ashley Webb. As Principal Research Scientist, Manager Grains Agronomy & Pathology Partnership, Ashley helped Pip get back on track and decide whether to pursue the Research Scientist Classification. Together they identified options, talked them through openly and tested practical opportunities.

Pip was pleased with the openness of the conversation without any negative impact on her opportunities within the Department. And when Ashley took 3 weeks’ leave she discussed the idea of Pip acting in her role with her Group Director, who agreed.

‘The program created the opportunity to act in and experience my Mentor’s position, which was a Leader position. I’m hugely grateful to my Mentor for being willing to listen and having a vast amount of experience to share. Perhaps it wasn’t a deliberate strategy—but my mentor built my confidence by providing practical opportunity as much as facilitating my thought process and providing encouragement,’ said Pip.

‘I was really pleased to work with Pip in this program. Some of the challenges we discussed were complex. She did a fantastic job acting in my role. This opened up further opportunities for her,’ said Ashley.

Pip has since gone on to become a mentor in the 2020 program, a move that will further enhance her leadership capability.

80% of participants say the program positively impacted retention.

We also recently completed a survey, asking all participants since 2016 to reflect on their experience in the mentoring program. The intention was to discover the medium to longer term impacts of the mentoring program.

Source: 2019 Post Mentoring Program Longitudinal Survey

Participants who responded to the survey reported many positive benefits from the program:

70% of mentees who responded indicated the program positively enhanced their Career/Job Satisfaction.
90% mentors and 64% of mentees and reported a positive impact on leadership capacity.
80% of mentees indicated the program had both a positive impact on their attitude to their employer and the likelihood of continuing to work in their profession.
90% of mentors also indicated the program positively impacted their likelihood of continuing to work in their profession as well as personal learning and growth.
85% of participants indicated they valued the Department for offering them the mentoring opportunity.

As observed in most mentoring programs, the benefits to mentors were often significant and surprising. The Department now has a ‘bench’ of mentors who have strengthened their capacity for leading others, and a pool of mentees who have begun already to step up as mentors to others as the program has started cascading to lower levels.

A notable result is that ten mentees have had promotions and
four have had significant career changes since participating in the program. Three mentees have gone on to subsequently being mentors in the program.

When we asked participants the most important benefits they gained from the program, the answers varied.

Mentees noted a range of benefits including:

“Clarification of career direction and opportunities working as a scientist within a government agency.”

“The opportunity to step back, take a look at my own direction and develop an (unwritten) ‘5-year’ plan.”

Mentors also noted benefits often associated with mentoring.

“Learning skills about being a mentor.”

“Enhanced ability to listen & steer mentees into coming up with solutions to their quests.”

Retention and engagement equally as critical as leadership development

With limited numbers of senior scientists spread far and wide across NSW, a formal mentoring program connecting scientists across geographies has been very successful. According to participants, Art of Mentoring’s program has had an overwhelmingly positive influence on their likelihood to stay on in their profession and with the Department, as well as their career and job satisfaction and their attitude to their employer. Retention and engagement has emerged equally as critical as leadership development to the future of Australian science.

Art of Mentoring can help any organisation launch, run or evaluate a mentoring program. For more information please contact us.

References:

Lee, A., Dennis, C. and Campbell, P. 2007. Nature’s guide for mentors. Nature 447, 791-797 (14 June 2007).

Media Release: Mentor of the Year Award 2019

Art of Mentoring announces the winner of their inaugural Mentor of the Year Award 2019 on International Mentoring Day

Sydney, 17 January, 2020: To celebrate International Mentoring Day, Art of Mentoring, an Australian based mentoring business operating globally in 26+ countries, has awarded Tim Fletcher, Consultant Town Planner, the prestigious Mentor of the Year Award 2019.

Mr Fletcher participated in the Planning Institute of Australia’s (PIA) Emerging Professionals Mentoring Program in 2019.

PIA is the national body representing planners and the planning profession. It provides professional education, communicates key planning policy changes to its members and advocates on various policy positions to federal and state government bodies.

During the eight-month program, Mr Fletcher mentored Lou Hawkins, a senior statutory planner at Wodonga Council, who in turn nominated Mr Fletcher for the Award.

Winning nomination highlights mentor’s genuine support

In response to Art of Mentoring’s question, “what were you able to achieve with the help of your mentor and in what way was your mentor instrumental in this?” Ms Hawkins answered:

“Confidence. I suffered greatly from imposter syndrome, and found presenting (even in small teams) and public speaking, very intimidating. Tim helped me to work to develop my professional confidence. Since working with Tim I have become comfortable ‘taking up space’ in conversations and have presented on multiple occasions including at VCAT, council briefings and at an all staff forum. This confidence is not just related to public speaking, but all professional interactions and functions,” said Ms Hawkins.

When asked why Art of Mentoring should choose Tim Fletcher, Ms Hawkins provided this example of how her mentor went above and beyond to help her:

“Tim found a perfect balance between providing me with support and direction, and allowing me the necessary room to grow. He was able to lead me out of my comfort zone to allow me to be challenged whilst providing support and encouragement which facilitated my success. As a headstrong professional, I could not have achieved the success that I have without Tim’s willingness to ask me to do things that challenged me,” continued Ms Hawkins.

Mentee shares the secrets of her successful mentoring partnership

In a program follow-up survey, Program Manager Gina Meibusch asked Ms Hawkins, “what advice would you give mentees starting a mentoring relationship?”

Ms Hawkins replied:

“You get what you put in! The relationship needs to be driven by the mentee—the mentor is not going to wade in take your hand and lead you down the path to success. You need to know (or to look for) where you’re going and what you want. If you don’t ask you’re not going to get. Be vulnerable! Point to it and ask for help.

I’m singing the praises of the program to anyone who’ll listen! We’re a regional branch, so there’s only a small pool of people locally we can turn to. Having someone like Tim is priceless.

The virtual program works well. Through good luck we met face to face once before launch. Tim was travelling past and we caught up for a coffee. If you can skype, it’s better than phone, as you get to know more of your mentor as a person. Even if you have a good match, building rapport is important. You need to understand them and you as a person. It also helps the advice be specific to you—you can see so much about each other and the answer is more real and genuine.”

Art of Mentoring recognises outstanding mentors across programs in Australian organisations and associations

Art of Mentoring also awarded six Finalist Awards to outstanding mentors in the following programs within organisations and associations:

2019 Anglo American Growspace Mentoring Program
2019 Australian Tax Office (ATO) Albury Mentoring Program
2019 CPA Australia Mid-Career Mentoring Program
2019 The Law Society of NSW Women’s Mentoring Program
2019 Association of Massage Therapists (AMT) Mentoring Program
2019 Association of School Business Administrators (ASBA) Mentoring Program

Mentoring helps attract and retain employees and association members through professional development

Art of Mentoring designs, implements and manages mentoring programs for organisations and membership associations throughout Australia.

Studies show that a well-run mentoring program helps attract and retain employees by demonstrating an organisation’s or association’s commitment to talent development.

Mentoring is also instrumental in preparing the next generation of leaders. Researchers have shown that teaching people high quality mentoring skills, helps them develop their transformational leadership capacities.¹ There is also growing consensus that mentors benefit as much as mentees in this regard.

For associations, attracting and retaining members is critical to their financial viability. A well-structured and managed mentoring program offers significant returns by providing high quality professional development that engages their member base and advances the profession or industry they represent.

The Art of Mentoring difference

The Art of Mentoring team is led by Melissa Richardson whose experience in mentoring spans more than 20 years in the private, public and not-for-profit sectors. Melissa and her team use an evidence-based approach to mentoring drawn from research into the experiences of thousands of mentors and mentees around the world.

Melissa is a global assessor for the European Mentoring and Coaching Council’s ISMCP Award (International Standards for Mentoring and Coaching Programs) and leads the International Work Group for Mentoring and Coaching Program Manager training and accreditation.

Committed to raising the bar of developmental learning conversations worldwide, Art of Mentoring offers a blend of software, online educational content as well as highly experienced program managers to oversee programs and prepare mentors and mentees for success.

ABOUT ART OF MENTORING

Art of Mentoring is a mentoring business based in Australia and operating globally in 26+ countries. They offer the latest in mentoring best practice with a vast range of evidence-based programs, expert consultants, software and world-class resources to support the design and implementation of effective mentoring in your organisation.

Art of Mentoring is a proud member of Coaching & Mentoring International (CMI), a global network of mentoring, coaching and developmental dialogue specialists, allowing them to support the Art of Mentoring product and services range with people on the ground in most parts of the world.

They have been designing and implementing mentoring programs since 1997. Their management is supported by an expert team of Program Designers and Managers.

[1] Kram, K. and Ragins, B.R. (2007) The Landscape of Mentoring in the 21st Century. In K. Kram & B.R. Ragins (Eds.) The Handbook of Mentoring at Work (pp. 659-692), CA: Sage.

For more information, contact:

Angela Bruce
Sales & Marketing Coordinator
Art of Mentoring

E: angela@artofmentoring.net

Responding with Intention: Leadership after Crisis

Responding with Intention: Leadership after Crisis

In less than six months, bushfires have ravaged the environment, homes and livelihoods of thousands of Australians. The toll on human and animal life has been vast, sparking a resounding debate about the quality of our leadership in the face of this crisis.

As we return to work after the break, we may all feel the need to step up to a new level of leadership. Providing a steady hand on the tiller and acting with purpose in the face of upheaval, is critical now.

For this reason, we’re offering a new training course “Coaching and Mentoring During and After a Crisis” in the coming months. In the meantime, here are some thoughts.

How the reptilian brain hijacks the executive brain

As people leaders, it’s incumbent on us to soothe our own anxieties so we can coach and mentor others with a fully functioning executive brain. We can have a whole toolbox of neat coaching or mentoring techniques, but they’re worthless when the reptilian brain is active.

How do we know when the reptilian brain has kicked in? You know that feeling when your thinking is fuzzy and unclear? Maybe your heart is racing, or adrenalin is rushing through your body. Your breathing is shallow. Perhaps you’ve noticed nothing until a snarky comment escapes your mouth and your significant other has taken offence. It can sneak up on you, an accumulation of little anxieties and before you know it, you’re in survival, fight-or-flight mode. You can’t be useful to others when you’re in that state. I know, because it happened to me, and I had to consciously calm myself after months of bushfire crisis that brought the fires to within 20kms of our home.

When you’re in this state, and you want to respond in an adult way to whatever has triggered you, there are some steps you can take. I find this model personally useful.

Techniques to re-engage the executive brain after crisis

The first step is to simply stop and notice what’s going on in your mind and body. Take a deep breath so you can slow down or stop the waterfall of thoughts. Give your feelings a label—is it fear, anxiety, shame or something else? Just acknowledging the emotion will help engage your executive brain.

Then, look at how you can reframe the situation, thought or issue that’s triggering you. If you know something about Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT), then you may be good at challenging your own thoughts or beliefs (I’m not very good at that, but I do respond well to someone else challenging me). You need to recognise that cognitive bias has entrapped you, so look intentionally for alternative explanations or ways of thinking.

By now you will be feeling calmer and you can choose how to respond rather than acting on autopilot.

How does self-awareness support coaching and mentoring?

Your reports and colleagues may be coming back to work tired, anxious and demotivated. If they’ve had personal losses they could find it hard to cope. You may feel challenged when people are present but not productive—how do you coach someone through that? It won’t be easy, but it will be impossible if you’re in a triggered state yourself. So, before you have any coaching or mentoring conversations in the next few months, try scanning your mind and body before you begin. If you’re feeling even slightly triggered, run through the steps above to summon your executive brain, lead with intention and expertly guide your team out of crisis to calmer waters.

Best of luck!

Like to learn more about mentoring? Join our webinars here.
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Why Mentoring Programs Derail

When designed well, mentoring programs enjoy high engagement, strong mentee goal achievement and mentees circle back to become mentors. But that’s not always the case. In this webinar we will share with you the secrets we’ve discovered to making mentoring programs high impact and sustainable.

Diversity and Inclusion

Diversity & Inclusion initiatives are commonplace in organisations today, as they strive to harness the talents of an increasingly diverse workforce. In this webinar, we will explore diversity beyond gender to consider:

Why Diversity Mentoring is important right now
Examples of Diversity Programs that target different groups
Issues to think about when designing mentoring for diversity.

Webinar Presenters

Melissa Richardson, Managing Director, Art of Mentoring
Professor David Clutterbuck, CMI and Clutterbuck Partnership

Lessons in Diversity Mentoring
Today’s organisations must be able to capitalise on diversity – tapping into a multi-cultural workforce, managing the demands of an increasingly well-educated and experienced cadre of female managers and facilitating virtual teams and alliances in a global workplace. By facilitating cross-group understanding and supporting disadvantaged or minority groups within an organisation, mentoring is emerging as a powerful method for encouraging organizational diversity. However, mentoring within or between unique groups comes with unique problems. We outline below some of the key lessons that have been learned thus far in “diversity mentoring”.

1. Define the Purpose Carefully
Any mentoring program should be clear about its purpose, but this is particularly the case with “diversity mentoring” because it is so easy to generalize. A mentoring program that is simply to “support women in the organisation” is likely to lead to a large number of lunch meetings where everyone wonders what they are doing here.

2. Know Your Audience
There is a genuine risk that good intention leads to unintentional insult. We have seen a number of instances where mentoring programs intended to support a specific group were perceived as devaluing that group. So for example a program designed to support a specific racial minority may lead the group to feel that they are considered “not good enough”. It is important to understand the perspective of the group you are trying to support.

3. Make Programs “Opt In”
For any mentoring program to be successful it is critical that both the mentors and the mentees want to be there. This is even more important for diversity programs, particularly cross group programs where you are asking people to listen and understand others with substantially different perspectives.

4. Ensure Quality Trumps Quantity
If you are running a diversity program it is tempting to want to include everyone who fits the diversity objective. But the truth is that establishing a bad mentoring relationship is far worse than having no relationship at all – particularly when dealing with delicate diversity issues. It is essential that programs are limited to the number of quality mentors available. A quality mentor will need to have strong communication and empathic skills and a track record in people development. (See our article on Selecting a Mentor for more on what makes a good mentor.)

5. Same Group Verses Cross Group? – It depends
There is much discussion about whether diversity programs work best if the mentor and mentee are from the same group or different groups. Each has its advantages. A same group relationship is likely to establish a strong rapport and empathy between the mentor and mentee. On the other hand, cross group relationships are able to foster a greater level of cross-cultural or gender understanding which can be advantageous to the organisation as a whole. The decision goes back to our first lesson – know your purpose. If the purpose is to help disenfranchised employees to grow confident and comfortable within a role or an organisation then same group programs may be more successful. If the purpose is to foster communication and understanding within your organisation then cross group programs will work better.

6. Invest in Training
There is little more frustrating to us than to watch organisations run mentoring programs without appropriate mentor/mentee training. It is critical to the success of any mentoring program that both sides of the relationship receive training. All training programs must be geared to help mentees understand their role in the process and to raise mentor’s “coaching” competencies. In diversity mentoring it is also critical that both sides of the relationship are trained to be aware of diversity issues, such as how stereotyping occurs and how different cultures or genders may approach the same issue differently.

7. Acknowledge Stereotyping
Stereotyping is probably the biggest single barrier to success of diversity mentoring programs. In same group relationships stereotypes may be shared and go unquestioned – despite the fact that these stereotypes may be the biggest single barriers to success. In cross group relationships the stereotypes of one or both sides may lead to assumptions that unconsciously limit the potential of the relationship. It is critical that stereotypes be discussed and acknowledged during training, and that mentors, in particular, are trained to be able to openly and honestly discuss the role of stereotype in the mentoring relationship and in the mentee’s progress within the organisation.

8. Balance Disadvantage With Advantage
Often diversity mentoring involves a relationship between a disadvantaged person and someone who is not. The most obvious example of this would be physically handicapped mentees working with the able bodied. This requires a tricky balancing act on the part of the mentor. On the one hand if the disadvantage is completely ignored then the mentee may feel patronized and there is a failure to recognise some of the limitations that may need to be overcome. On the other hand if the disadvantage is allowed to take centre stage this may limit the ability to set stretch goals. An effective way for mentors to deal with this is to balance disadvantage with advantage. Work with the mentee to establish a realistic balance sheet of the advantages and disadvantages they have in the workplace. This recognizes that the disadvantage is a reality to be faced, but also puts it into a framework that allows for progress.

About Professor David Clutterbuck

David co-founded the European Mentoring Centre and helped to steer its evolution into the European Mentoring and Coaching Council – the coordinating body for professional practice in this area in Europe. He has been chair of both the UK and European research committees of the EMCC and is now a lifetime ambassador for the EMCC.

He lectures on coaching and mentoring at universities and conferences around the world. He led the research team that created the International Standards for Mentoring Programmes in Employment (ISMPE) and is the ISMPE’s current chair.

David has coached and consulted widely in the public, private and not-for-profit sectors. He originally brought the concept of structured mentoring to Europe in the late 1970’s and has developed an international reputation for his mentoring programme design and support, helping hundreds of companies, voluntary bodies and government agencies around the world create sustainable mentoring programmes.

David has an exceptionally strong research background, which underpins his work. He is the author or co-author of 60 books, of which 20 relate specifically to coaching and mentoring and hundreds of articles.

One of the recent fruits of his research has been the Talent Wave, a radical rethink of HR practice in talent management and succession planning. Another is a re-evaluation of the role of goals in coaching and mentoring.

Mind your Mentoring Mindset

Coming from a Mentoring Mindset

Recently, I had the pleasure of hosting Cathy Burke in our webinar “Mentoring Women Under the Spotlight”. As CEO of The Hunger Project, Cathy spent much of her career working with women and men in villages in Africa and the east, supporting them to break the poverty cycle for themselves.

Much of her talk was about shifting “mindsets” – of the women in these villages and the men around them – in order to make sustainable change. She talked of the importance of bringing a “beginner’s mindset” to these problems.

When we train and support mentors to become masterful mentors, we focus very much on “who you are being” as opposed to just “what you are doing”. When mentors think about the kind of mentor they want to be (usually this equates to the kind of mentor they wish they’d had!), it helps them to bring compassion, empathy and a good dose of listening to the relationship.

But what we haven’t really talked about, is, what is the mentoring mindset that masterful mentors bring?

What is a Mindset?

A mindset is a set of beliefs that guide and help us orient how to behave and make decisions. Mindsets frame how we see situations and suggest how we might react; they focus our attention on certain aspects of the environment, and they can become habitual.

In her book “Mindset”, Carol Dweck popularised a particular type of mindset with respect to intelligence, one that has gained widespread adoption in schools and workplaces. People who have a Growth Mindset believe that intelligence can be developed, and this leads to a desire to learn. People with a Fixed Mindset believe intelligence is static and have less passion for learning.

The best mentors we have observed have a mentoring mindset characterised by:

Curiosity – they believe that the mentee is the expert on their own lives and they are curious to learn about what makes them tick. They don’t make assumptions – they ask questions.

Humility – they believe they still have much to learn themselves and don’t put themselves on a pedestal.

Respect for difference – they believe that they can have a perfectly functional relationship with someone who is quite different in many ways, and that their difference does not in any way make them wrong or deficient.

Question yourself

Even the most experienced mentors can be blind to the mindsets that guide their way of behaving with a mentee. Perhaps they have never identified for themselves, who do I want to be as a mentor?

Next time you go into a mentoring session, prepare yourself by asking:

What kind of mentor do I challenge myself to be?

and

What mindset(s) am I bringing to the conversation today?

Like to learn more about mentoring? Join our webinars here.

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I’m a Mentor, Now What?

In our work with thousands of mentors, we typically see three different reactions to taking on the role of mentor inside an organisation or membership body (gender irrelevant; names are used just to describe the personae):

1. Over-Confident Orlando

Orlando has been a manager for over a decade, so he thinks that automatically makes him a good mentor. He knows how to lead and manage people, so this mentoring thing should be easy, right? Wrong.

Mentoring is quite different from managing. For a start, the person being mentored is probably not a direct report, so there are very different relationship responsibilities and issues, plus, the mentee is quite free to ignore what the mentor says (it’s a career-limiting move for a direct report to ignore their boss).

Second, Orlando may not be a very good listener. He may get away with this as a manager (only just) but poor listening will almost certainly lead to poor mentoring.

Finally, if Orlando thinks he has nothing to learn about mentoring, then almost certainly he has a Fixed Mindset rather than a Growth Mindset, and believes that his and his mentee’s abilities are unchanging. Orlando would be a better role model for his mentee if he believed that people can learn and grow, otherwise as a mentor he may unwittingly help his mentee stunt their own development.

2. Uncertain Ursula

Ursula is the polar opposite of Orlando. She may be afflicted with imposter syndrome and wonder when the mentoring program organisers are going to discover she really has nothing to contribute. She may play it very safe and need a great deal of support in the form of training, tools and guides until she feels more comfortable. She may find herself paired with a mentee very different from herself and will find this extremely challenging.

She does, however, recognise she has a lot to learn and will relish educational opportunities. If she can build confidence, she may make a very good mentor.

3. Comfortable Caitlyn

Caitlyn may not have mentored before, but she takes to it like a duck to water. She laps up the resources provided to her and supplements these with her own bag of tricks she has built up over the years. She knows and is not frightened when she is out of her depth, so she will seek help when needed. She has natural warmth and empathy and quickly puts her mentee at ease with her accomplished listening and questioning skills. She is not threatened by revealing her weaknesses, in fact she talks about her foibles with some humour and doesn’t take herself too seriously. She has a Growth Mindset and encourages this in her mentees.

I am not sure of the incidence of these three mentor types (that could be the subject of a future study) but, in my experience we have far too many Orlandos in our organisations and even the best mentor trainer would have trouble turning them into Comfortable Colins, assuming they would attend the training.

Even more extreme examples are ‘celebrity mentors’ who frequent start-up mentoring programs for entrepreneurs. Whilst some of these people may make very good mentors, a dose of celebrity from having earned millions from the sale of a business may lull even the best into believing in their own infallibility and forgetting their own circumstances may have been very different from their mentee’s.

So, what can we do as potential mentors?

Be honest with yourself. If you haven’t mentored before, ask yourself if you really understand what it takes to be a great mentor. If you’re not sure what a great mentor looks like, try to educate yourself. You can start by reading the tips below.
Calibrate your confidence level. Are you feeling timid about starting? If so, skilling up will lift your confidence. Ask your program organiser to provide resources if they haven’t already. Are you feeling super-confident? It might be time to get some feedback from people you trust about whether you really are a good listener and ask great questions; or do you automatically hand out advice and pearls of wisdom before you fully understand the issue?
Seek out role models. Find some people who are acknowledged to be masterful mentors and interview them, to see what you can learn.
Mind your mindset. Try to bring a ‘mentoring mindset’ to each conversation with your mentee. Attitude trumps skill every time.

Professor David Clutterbuck offers these insights into mentoring mastery:

Characteristics of great mentors

Listen deeply and attentively. Great mentors listen much more than they talk.
Ask really powerful questions. They listen deeply to the mentee and so have time to draw on their experience to ask questions that will stimulate deep thinking.
Understand what is useful feedback. Recognise the difference between giving advice (which is generally far less helpful than the giver thinks) and guiding by giving context (which provides just enough information for the mentee to find new perspectives and solutions on their own).
Self-awareness. Great mentors have strong emotional intelligence and a deep humility that comes from self-knowledge.
Compassion. They care about and believe in the potential of their mentees and their ability to continue growth. They are brave enough to give tough advice or feedback and confident that this will not harm the relationship.
Knowing when to let go. They’re delighted when the mentee outgrows the need for their support and see this as a sign of the success of the learning relationship. They may even enjoy some reverse mentoring from their mentee.

Tips for Program Managers

Discourage over-confident people from volunteering as mentors, unless they have enough of a Growth Mindset to be willing to attend or complete online training. Preparing mentors for the engagement is a critical success factor in mentoring programs and mentors who are unprepared to complete at least 1-2 hours of orientation are either too busy to take the responsibility seriously or will never make great mentors.
Try to identify and support the Ursulas – they will need your help and guidance as well as reassurance that they are doing a good job. A mid-program check-in is useful but may be too late to identify mentors who lack confidence so try to identify who needs more support, early in your program.
Encourage mentees to give their mentors honest feedback to help them more realistically assess their own capability.
Provide higher level mentor training to Caitlyns so that they continue to hone their mentoring mastery.

Like to learn more about mentoring? Join our webinars here.

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The 3 Best Ways to Build Trust for Mentors

The three best ways for mentors to build trust… and you might not like it!

Trust between mentor and mentee is said to be the cornerstone of an effective mentoring relationship. It can take time and sometimes a little effort to build trust and rapport, but it’s worth the trouble.

The very nature of the relationship puts the mentor in a higher power position than the mentee, so whilst both members of the dyad are responsible for building a trusting relationship, it is incumbent on the mentor to work just that little bit harder.

So, what can mentors do to build trust quickly?

Behaviours of Trusted Leaders Mentors

Stephen Covey claims to have identified 13 common behaviours of trusted leaders:

Talk Straight
Demonstrate Respect
Create Transparency
Right Wrongs
Show Loyalty
Deliver Results
Get Better
Confront Reality
Clarify Expectation
Practice Accountability
Listen First
Keep Commitments
Extend Trust [1]

One could easily substitute the word ‘mentor’ for ‘leader’. Many of the behaviours on this list are behaviours we would expect of a masterful mentor. But which are the critical ones, and are there particular behaviours that mentors must display to foster trust with their mentees?

Given how important trust in mentoring seems to be, there are surprisingly few studies that examine exactly what mentors do to build trust. One qualitative study found that the trust mentees feel for their mentors is determined by the professional competence of the mentor, their consistency, their ability to communicate, their interest, and their readiness to share control.[2] In a further study, mentees reported that there were attributes and behaviours on the part of their mentors that helped in building trust and respect. In interviews they spoke about “being listened to” and “knowing the conversation was confidential” which helped them be honest and open. They also mentioned “not feeling judged”. [3]

Training Mentors to Build Trust

In mentor training at Art of Mentoring, we focus on three key mentor behaviours to build trust. Sometimes, we get resistance, because they are not easy to do.

First, listen. Novice mentors need to speak less and listen more. When a mentee knows their mentor is there to just listen, and they feel fully “heard’, then something magical opens up in the relationship. Many experienced managers find it hard to stop talking long enough to listen very intently, because they believe their role as mentor is to give advice and talk about themselves.
Keep your promises. The most important promise is to do with confidentiality. When a mentee trusts that what they share will never become dinner table conversation for the mentor, they can open themselves up and become vulnerable – which is a window to their learning.
Don’t just be open, be vulnerable. Mentors that are open about their mistakes, their weaknesses, their failures and foibles, immediately knock themselves off the pedestal and make themselves more approachable.

As a leader and mentor, it can be hard to be vulnerable. I had a recent experience of this in my own company, when I felt compelled to apologise to team members that we had not managed them well and allowed their high stakes project to be derailed. I did not want them to feel responsible for an outcome that was only partially of their making.

The result was somewhat surprising.

It turned what could have been a major breach of trust, into the very opposite. We all walked away, I believe, with a stronger connection and loyalty to one another. I learned a powerful lesson that day – that the risk of vulnerability and admitting flaws, poor decisions and faulty judgement – was worth the relationship outcome. Our people want us to be human, to have failings and to be real at work (see my recent blog, How to be human at work). I believe it is the same with mentoring relationships.

So, my challenge to you as mentors, is to listen much more, be vulnerable and keep your promises.

Build trust. I promise you won’t regret it.

Find out more about improving your mentoring skills. We can expertly guide you in developing skill sets as both a mentor and mentee, without having to leave your desk.

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[1] https://www.linkageanz.com.au/uploads/pdf/Stephen_Covey_How_the_Best_Leaders_Build_Trust.pdf; downloaded 30 April 2019

[2] Erdem, F.and Aytemur, J.O. (2008) Mentoring:A Relationship Based on Trust: Qualitative Research; Public Personnel Management Volume 37 No. 1

[3] Evans, C. Trust and connection in formal, virtual mentoring; International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring 2018, Special Issue 12

The Coach-AI Partnership

The Coach-AI Partnership

If coaches are to benefit from the rise of Artificial Intelligence, then they will need to embrace the new technology and integrate it with their practice. But what does that mean?

The coach-AI partnership fulfills several functions:

It provides real-time information about what is going on in the conversation, in the client and in the coach
It allows instant access to other sources of relevant and potentially relevant information
The AI can suggest questions and lines of enquiry (meaning that you as coach have to spend less time thinking about what you are going to ask next)
You can check your intuitions for confirming or disconfirming evidence
It creates opportunities for in-depth review of each coaching session, from the perspective of alternative approaches (for example, “You chose not to follow this clue, but how might the conversation have gone, if you did?”) or better wording of questions. Of course, this is a learning process for both the coach and the AI

Making the coach-AI partnership work

The key to successful partnerships will lie in questions such as the following:

What am I not noticing? For example:

The client avoids questions that address a particular area.
The micropauses, skin temperature changes, posture shifts and so on that indicate discomfort or other emotions: for example, an AI can learn to recognise the physical patterns that indicate when a client is lying to themselves.
How I am reacting to the client.

What patterns are emerging? For example:

Linguistic: for example, repeated words or phrase that appear to have a particular meaning or emotive undertone.
Narrative: for example, a tendency to self-sabotage or a set of limiting assumptions in the client about themselves or others.
Conversational: for example, is it going round in large circles? (The structure of conversation is usually too complex for humans to follow in the moment.) What can I as a coach learn from the patterns of this conversation that will improve my practice?

What other bodies of knowledge might be relevant? For example:

If I am feeling manipulated by the client, what are the signs of sociopathy that I might look out for? (And the AI can, of course, compare the conversation with those signs.)
What do we know generally about people in the client’s situation?
What strategic planning models might be helpful here?

What’s too complex for me to analyze? For example:

Where the client is faced with multiple, complicated choices, you will be able to ask the AI to turn these into a decision-tree, which you and the client can work through together.

How can I test my intuition?

The AI can either provide data relevant to the client in front of you, or a general overview of similar situations.

The dangers of an AI-coach partnership

Three main dangers stand out, tough there may be many more that emerge with practice.

The first is that coach and AI may become such a strong partnership that the client is left out and feels both under scrutiny and manipulated. It will be essential, therefore, to develop a three-way partnership in which the client is also able to access the AI.

The process of pausing and reviewing during coaching conversations will become even more important than at present, as both coach and client take the opportunity to review not just the conversation as they have experienced it, but also to request observations from the AI. As yet, we have no protocols for this situation, but there will need to be an understanding of whether it is most beneficial to the client to have constant data feed from the AI, or periodic-pause interactions with the AI, or a mixture of the two.

Another related danger is that the coach (or the client, if they are also AI-enabled) becomes distracted by the flow of information that the quality of their listening and attentiveness suffers.

Thirdly, humans instinctively respond to complexity-in-the-moment by focussing on process. The journey towards coach maturity is one that starts with models and processes and gradually let’s go of them as we become more confident in letting the client and the conversation follow their own path. If we become overwhelmed with information, we may revert to mechanistic, plodding conversations. If that happens, it is we as coaches, who have become the robots!

David Clutterbuck 2018