Current track

Title

Artist

Current show

The Wind Down Zone Meditation and music
10:00 pm 12:00 am

Current show

The Wind Down Zone Meditation and music
10:00 pm 12:00 am

Background

Morning Sisterhood – Career Mentoring

Mentoring Sisterhood

Deborah Gordon – Biography

  • Accomplished professional with solid experience in organisational development, change management including designing, developing, and implementing learning and development programmes. Coaching & Mentoring. Exceptional ability to manage multiple projects in high pressured, time-sensitive environments.
    Specialised in delivering training to boost and improve clients’ abilities and recognise/launch steps needed to attain L&D objectives. Ability to build strong rapport and work collaboratively with staff, partner agencies, and residents based on knowledge, professionalism, and integrity.
    Exceptional interpersonal and communication skills; build positive, effective business relationships with people from diverse cultures and at all professional levels. Recognised for integrated working through “Skills for Care” accolades 2017.
  • Early career – Nursery Nurse & Early Years Care Management, Residential work, Youth Work, Teaching, Counselling, led on the Equality, Diversity & Inclusion agenda
  • Enjoy Music, travelling, socialising and community engagement, health & exercise
  • Voluntary work – Saturday School, Mentoring, National Workforce Committees, Children in Need

What is Mentoring

  • Mentoring: Mentoring is a relationship between two people for the purposes of developing themselves or their careers in navigating the workplace or a particular field. More often than not, the relationships are mutually beneficial, with both partners learning and benefiting from the relationship.
  • Coaching: Coaching is instructional, often with a particular goal or focus, such as developing technical or soft skills or related learning and growth, and can be used as a way to train someone on a discrete task or series of tasks.
  • Sponsorship: Sponsorship is when one partner, usually someone at a more senior level and/or an individual with strong influence within an organisation, assists a protégée in gaining visibility for particular assignments, promotions, or positions.
  • The Mentoring role is often recognized as having a career, job, or opportunity-related purpose with some inherent degree of accountability on the sponsor’s part.

Benefits of Mentoring

  • Increased organisational commitment
  • Reduced turnover
  • Enhanced recruitment efforts
  • Improved company performance
  • Increased promotion opportunities
  • Increased knowledge transfer

Organisational and Individual

  • Increased support for diversity and inclusion Individual
  • Decreased stress
  • Increased job satisfaction
  • Improved individual performance; increased skill
  • Increased exposure to and decreased bias against those who are different

Being a Career Mentor

  • A good Career Mentor is an individual with a sound and broad knowledge of a particular employment area or role, and the skills required within this area or role.
  • A mentor should have good communication skills, be non-judgemental, be a good listener and have the ability to encourage, motivate and develop others.
  • Typical roles of a mentor include:
  • ADVISER Provides advice, which the mentee decides how best to use.
  • SOUNDING BOARD Testing ideas and suggestions.
  • MOTIVATOR Encouraging and motivating to achieve.
  • FACILITATOR Highlighting opportunities for personal development

Setting Boundaries

  • Come prepared to talk about expectations and hopes for the mentorship• Set meeting dates.
  • Decide on the frequency and length of meetings.
  • Choose an appropriate location for your meetings.
  • Discuss the expectations of the programme (both mentor and mentee)
  • Discuss confidentiality.
  • Find out about your mentee i.e. degree programme, career goals, interests, previous work experience.
  • Provide an overview of your background and experience.
  • Agree objectives for future meetings.
  • Look at issues your mentee needs to/should address.
  • Ensure you are both keeping a record of meetings (mentor/mentee) – a meeting record template can be found on the resources
  • What can I offer someone I mentor?
  • How do I visualise mentoring someone?
  • What career experiences have helped me most in my own professional and personal development?
  • What are the important lessons learnt from my own career path

Things to consider

  • Focus on working with your mentees to clarify their goals – think long term and work back
  • Give suggestions and advice about meeting their development goals e.g how to develop career plans and develop a network.
  • Suggest ways they can build skills, experience, confidence in readiness for development or progression opportunities
  • Provide feedback and insight on how a mentee can develop their skills through new projects – help protect them from risks involved in visibility
  • Help ‘navigate’ your mentees about how to go about things in the organisation, including P(p)olitics
  • Provide advice support and a space for the mentee to reflect, expand their perceptions and think more openly

The CLEAR model for development conversations

  • Contract   Focus on agreeing the scope of the conversation:  ‘what do you want to focus on today? ‘What   would be a helpful use of time?’  ‘What do you want to come away from with today?’
  • Listen     Allowing the individual in the conversation express their thoughts and feelings. (Try and avoid   ‘why’) Use active listening and questioning.
  • Explore   Ask questions (humble enquiry) for insight  and depth of knowledge to gain a deeper  understanding of the situation to mutual benefit
  • Action    Confirm next steps and who is doing what, when.
  • Review  Check in,  did the individual get what they wanted from the session?

Mentoring Resources

Session 1 : The Wheel
Take some time to think about each area in the wheel and place a number on the line between 0 to 10 (1 = complete dissatisfaction and 10 = complete satisfaction). Each sector of the wheel represents a different area in your life. State where you are in relation to each area in your life to help you to think about the areas of your life, trace each section of the dotted line that corresponds to the number you have chosen to provide a visual representation.