Mentor Coaching & Training

Mentoring, whether formal or informal, can be truly valuable in the development of future leaders. However, mentors rarely if ever get any formal training to enhance the impact of their undoubted knowledge. Professional Mentor Training enhances the mentor’s effectiveness by enabling them to make informed choices about the way in which their expertise is best emulated in their charges. And there can be drawbacks too:

Typical issues to be addressed in a professional mentor coaching programme:

• Mentors may not be effective communicators
• Mentors may not fully understand or be practised in the role
• Mentors may simply be telling/advising without generating the real benefits that arise when the mentee develops their own thinking processes
• The mentor’s own methods may not be flexible enough for the individual’s needs
• The mentoring may not be aligned with a learning context
• The standard of mentoring may not be uniform throughout the organisation
• The learning may be delivered in a manner which is counter-cultural to the company or the individual
• A “dependency” culture between mentor/mentee may develop thereby limiting true learning

A coherent, planned approach to mentoring is therefore essential if it is to be fully effective. Ad-hoc use of willing but untrained volunteers or “senior” managers will rarely match the expectations of the willing learner or the innovative employer.

3CCCs integrated Mentor Coaching & Training programmes are designed to overcome the above limitations through the establishment of a cohesive, professional framework within which corporate mentors can operate to uniform standards.

Deliverable benefits of a professional mentoring programme are:

• Professional standards company-wide for mentoring support
• Standardised expectations of mentor and mentee for the process
• Revitalised management with enhanced support processes
• Retention, application and cascading of strategic knowledge within the company
• Clear, measurable development criteria for management
• Enhanced versatility and effectiveness in mentors' skill sets

MENTORING PROGRAMMES

The programmes, while being flexible and customised to the clients specific needs, are on four levels:

Level 1 – Consultancy in creating and establishing professional mentoring structures/capabilities within client organisations. The agreement of standard core skills and capabilities, the establishment of training/coaching requisites to round out the team’s and individual’s capability to meet those core requirements, the ongoing monitoring/training/coaching of individual mentors.

Level 2 – The provision of training for mentors for their role to meet the established criteria

Level 3 – Direct coaching support for mentors in their role to maintain the established standards.

Level 4 - Provision of continuing support structures e.g. workshops, seminars, e-forums and train-the-trainer programmes to establish and maintain ongoing self sufficiency in the organisation when required.

Aims of the programme are to establish a common understanding of –

• The differences between coaching, mentoring, teaching and counselling
• When to do which and why
• Contracting formal 1-2-1 mentoring between mentor and mentee
• McLeod Management Model for mentoring, coaching and leadership
• The “stretch-zone” and what can be achieved there
• Establishing and risking rapport: the development of mentee learning and behavioural change
• The Principal Instruments of Change: listening, questions, challenge, silence
• The Power of Silence: self-reflective stimulation
• Reflective language skills
• Sensory Journeys for motivated solutions

Specifically, mentors will:

• Know when to tell, when to show, when to tease-out
• Know when to question, challenge or be silent appropriately
• Understand more about motivation and the importance of self-starting
• Understand the dependence-independence dynamic and manage it skilfully
• Know how to establish a formal contract for mentoring with clear objectives
• Be practiced in a model for mentoring
• Have a wider range of linguistic skills to improve rapport-building and trust
• Have a wider understanding of questioning strategies and their effects.

•  3CCCs Coaching for Mentors
•  3CCCs Mentoring Programmes