Nov
19
2015
Cross-organisational mentoring: would you like to be involved?
By Sally Pearman.
The Centre has always offered Coaching training but over the past three years we’ve seen the number of managers almost tripled, going through our Effective mentoring training. This is clearly something all sectors are paying attention to; recognising the development and savings benefits of internal mentoring.
As someone who regularly benefits from having three very different mentors, I can wholeheartedly endorse the impact on having a mentor to support you at every stage of your career. I can also testify to the benefits of advising and supporting mentees – you can’t really beat building a relationship where you can see some ones confidence and capacity build over time.
But it isn’t always easy to find a mentor: your organisation maybe small, your role may be niche, and your ambitions may span outside of your current organisation (and that’s something you may not want to discuss with an internal mentor!).
This was a topic that came up in conversation with two HR managers I was working with last week. They both felt that they had a lot of staff and managers who would really benefit from a mentoring relationship with someone outside of their organisation. They were both happy to liaise with other HR Managers to make this happen but just needed an opportunity to arrange this with other like-minded HR and L&D managers.
And so the Centre thought we could help, by making introductions between the organisations we support, so these mentoring partnerships could be established.
Setting up a mentoring partnership: the steps
1. Do you have staff and managers that would like to be mentors or mentees?
We think it’s important that the organisations we connect are committed to both providing mentors and mentees.
2. Let us know if you’d like be added to our list of mentoring organisations:
Send an email to reception@the-centre.co.uk and we’ll arrange a conversation to talk through a bit more about your organisation, your size and location, and key areas for development.
3. We’ll connect you with other like-minded organisations:
We want this process to be as simple and as pain free as possible so we would put you in touch directly with the other HR managers and you can either meet here at the Centre, at one of our networking evenings, or at your own offices.
4. Let the mentoring begin!
You’ll then be in a position to advertise the mentoring opportunities and establish how this will work in each partnership.
The Centre would be taking on the role of match maker and we’re hopeful that the interest we’ve had already means that a lot of successful partnerships are just a few calls away.
For those individuals who are specifically working in HR it’s great to hear the CIPD have just launched their own mentoring scheme: they offer ‘speed networking’ evening to pair up HR professionals to kick start the mentoring relationships.
They also have some great fact sheets and also offer mentoring opportunities for jobseekers through their Steps Ahead Mentoring programme.
The Centre offers our popular one-day course Effective mentoring which offers practical tools and structures to ensure that each mentor knows how to establish and maintain a successful mentoring relationship. This is available for individuals at our training suite on Old Street or we can offer full-day, half-day, or Bite-size sessions of this course at your organisation.
