This post will attempt to answer your mentoring questions.  If it doesn’t please get in touch and I’ll answer directly.

Mentoring can be an invaluable element of any leadership or professional development programme. It can help organisations:

• Retain talented employees and reduce costs of turnover and recruitment

• Develop leaders – those who mentor as well as those mentored

• Facilitate career development and progression

• Build relationships and networks across the organisation

• Enable knowledge exchange and sharing of best practice

• Increase the return on any investment in learning and development

But delivering those benefits relies on making sure that all the parties involved receive the training they need to perform their roles effectively.

Recently I delivered a series of webinars for a leading UK university who were launching a mentoring programme for their MBA Alumni. Like most mentoring programmes within an organisation, alumni group or professional association, mentoring is a voluntary role. So it was critical that prospective mentors understand a number of key points:

1. What could they personally gain from performing the role?

2. What commitment would they need to make?

3. What skills would they need to perform the role effectively?

Your key mentoring questions answered

In my experience, many leaders and professionals are very interested in mentoring but feel nervous about taking on the role. They lack confidence about whether they can be of value to someone they don’t yet know. And they wonder if they need to have a lot more skill and experience than they have in case they need to have all the answers.

Much of this stems from some misunderstandings about what mentoring is and the role that a mentor should play. So it is critical that the launch of any Mentoring Programme includes an Introduction to Mentoring to provide that information.

Is Mentoring for Me?

Here is a revised version of the slides from the webinar I delivered.  Hopefully, it will answer your mentoring questions in the way it did with the webinar attendees.

Part 2 – Tools and Techniques for Mentoring

The next webinar is on Mentoring Tools and Techniques.  You can find out more here.