Mentoring
Investing in leadership development is critically important in building and sustaining a 'success culture'. Leaders and managers have to be fit for purpose, and be able to perform consistently at the top of their game, in order to be dynamic and effective in responding to the ongoing challenges of business. This means organisations need to invest in their development. Generic training is a very effective intervention for the development and synchronization of specific competencies; however innovative leadership development understands that technical knowledge, expertise and efficient task management are not the defining attribute of effective leadership. Leaders and senior managers require a more idiosyncratic approach to development. Mentoring is ideally suited to facilitate this type of development.
Successful Mentoring programmes understand that mentoring builds leadership capability. Successful programmes train and support senior executives to offer mentoring within the organisation to build a mentoring culture within the organisation.
Successful programmes use external mentors to develop and embed this process.
A Mentoring Programme provides individualised, accelerated learning opportunities:
- Mentors are more experienced and qualified than the mentee, often a more senior person within the same or a similar organisation who understands the challenges of leadership and management who passes on their knowledge, skill and experience
- Mentoring builds confidence on both personal and professional levels
- Mentoring supports the development of the mentor as well as the mentee
- Mentoring helps individuals develop their potential and build the insight to apply new and existing skills, knowledge and experience in different ways to new situations and to new problems
- Mentoring builds the capacity for collaborative working by developing interpersonal skills, 'political sensitivity' and an appetite for relationships based on mutual purpose and shared values
