Is mentoring fulfilling its potential?
teamUp members put their learning into action from day one, creating ripples that affect the performance, morale and commitment of the whole business.
Since the pandemic, there has been a 30% increase in the number of companies offering mentoring programmes.
Source: LHH
Mentoring is having a huge positive impact on individual, team and enterprise performance.
Every successful business is always looking to improve every area of its performance. Given the increasing time and money that is being invested into mentoring by companies, team leaders, mentors and mentees we began to consider how mentoring could be offered in a way to amplify its impact so that it could have an even greater positive impact.
To assist us we pulled together a team of specialists from the fields of business, education and performance coaching to form a mentoring brainstrust.
We asked them two questions.
Question One.
Is mentoring fulfilling its potential?
Question Two.
If not, what could be done to amplify its impact?
The answer to the first question was easy. No. Mentoring programmes are not perfect. By definition it is not fulfilling its potential. We focussed our time on the second question.
How could mentoring programmes fulfil their potential?
We came up with eight recommendations that would greatly increase the impact
Encourage the growth in an individuals ability to Lead, Evolve and Perform
It was the brainstrusts belief that there is no singular silver bullet to an individuals, team or enterprises sustainable growth and performance. Improvement is the result of interaction, deployment and continual development of multiple skills, capabilities and attributes. Our braintrust team put them into three categories.
Lead
The ability to lead teams strategically and transparently in an inspiring, collaborative, creative and inclusive manner.
Evolve
To be curious and continuously learning, growing their skills and skills of their team agilely and analytically.
Perform
To be recognised as someone that delivers consistently what they say they will do and is dependable, accountable, reflective, resilient, self aware and consistent
Identify and invest in an organisation's impact players.
Mentoring costs explicitly and implicitly. Explicitly in terms of the fees to the provider. Implicitly in terms of the time and energy that it can take away from the day to day operation of the organisation. The impact players offer the greatest chance of a return on the investment, now and in the future.
The impact players are the Gen Z and millennials, team members who have shown an appetite and ability to improve who are already in leadership roles and will have an even larger leadership role in the future. By investing in them it will increase their ability to contribute to the growth of the company and it will also positively impact on the culture of the organisation as the way they will lead grow their ability to inspire guide other team members to be their best too. This will impact on the people they work for, alongside and who work for them.