Planning your steps to your mountain top
 
June is an interesting month whether you have a career or are running a business. That half year point is always worth a pit stop to see exactly where you are!
 
It’s the official start of summer soon with the longest day on the 21st June, so how we have spent our time and where we now want to spend our time comes into greater focus.
 
What we are exploring here is how to make your half year review more useful, practical and meaningful so that you succeed in whatever you have defined as your journey and your mountains.
Size and complexity of mountains don’t matter. What does matter is that you are focussed on and aligned to what is important.
 
In business this half year stage can easily be missed. In your career, it can be reduced to a paperwork-heavy, balanced scorecard that is not looked at again until the year end.
 
You’ve got the opportunity to make it something way more valuable for leading yourself and leading others.
 
Our client, Nelly Attar, took her journey to one of the ultimate peaks:  the top of the world Everest. Yes, it was a physical and mental challenge in every way. The intrinsic result and purpose of climbing this mountain was to make a difference whilst championing sport for women and children in her home country, so all Nelly’s focus and time were aligned in every way. Nelly’s inspiring story and charity links are here.   
 
Your mountain journey doesn’t have to be quite this intense! Just recognising what your journey is and which point of it you are on, is a very useful and valuable activity in itself.

Checkpoint 1 – Meaningful Achievements
Start out by taking just two minutes to quickly note what things have meant the most to you so far this year. This can be anything, so it might include events, achievements, a project milestone, time out, new clients, time with your family, solving an issue, training your team, creating something, spending time in certain areas or places. The 2-minute restriction is important as it helps to see what you immediately value.
 
Checkpoint 2 – Explore Why
Set the clock again for 2 minutes and just explore each achievement and note by each achievement why they were important to you. What did it mean to you? Did it enable you to achieve other things? What was the overall impact? How did it make you feel? What leadership impact did these achievements have on others?
 
Checkpoint 3 – Written Objectives
As successful leaders of yourself or others, you will of course have brilliantly written and recorded back in January what you wanted to achieve this year, as you know that makes your achievement more likely to be successful. So, looking at these written objectives again, how have you done? It is really helpful here to look at what you have done rather than what you haven’t, so that you look and recognise progress even if your overall goal is yet to be achieved. Make sure you are being really objective and balanced about what you have done.
 
Checkpoint 4 – Your Learning
On looking at your written objectives, which leadership actions, behaviours and outcomes worked for you? What didn’t work? What insight have you gained from this? What help do you need? Asking for help, insight and feedback from others is a sign of strength in any leader. Learning from setbacks is one of the most important things we can do.
If you have a career, does your line manager agree with your view? If their view differs then seek to understand and explore to agree a way forward for you both. If you use defensiveness to challenge or acceptance without sharing, then your view will not be fully discussed. These responses lead to poor relationships and business outcomes.
If you have a business then it’s incredibly helpful to involve an external party such as a mentor, adviser or trusted business colleague to review with you, as well as engage all your team to gain insights and ideas.
 
Checkpoint 5 – Your Focus
Now compare your notes in Checkpoints 1 and 2 to Checkpoints 3 and 4. Are all your notes aligned here? Are the most meaningful achievements for you also aligned to your business objectives? One of the most useful questions to explore is if you are you spending your time in areas, results or on people where you really want it to be spent?
 
What do you really want going forward to make the second part of your year work best for you and your business interests?
 
Once you’ve done that, then it is a helpful time to consider how you are going to achieve this, what support you might need and what focus do you want for this?
 
We talked at one of leadership courses recently about different ways of spending our time and focus via Resilience Vitamins.
 
Which Resilience Vitamins might you want to add into your life?
 
It might not be the Vitamin Sea here. The common ones we see in our work are Vitamin A - to be more assertive and respectful over your needs, Vitamin P – to spend more time with the people in your life, Vitamin E - to enjoy more physical exercise, Vitamin T - to invest in your team training and support more or Vitamin R - to spend more review and planning time to explore what’s really important to you and your leadership goals.  It could even be Vitamin X that you want an exit strategy from what you are currently doing.

There are lots of options. The important thing here is to be a truly authentic leader and seek to explore, understand and sort the right solutions for your life and for your business/career interests.
 
Happy reviewing - Wishing you all a lovely Summer ahead! 😊
 
If you would like any help and support on your journey, please contact us for our flexible leadership and mentoring options for individuals and teams. More information on our leadership training programmes can be found here.

This is the question that I get asked the most so I thought it would be good to explore it here!

Mentoring means many different things to different people and organisations. This leaves a lot of confusion around what’s involved and what to expect.

The real question is who is leading the way?

We adhere to the Mentoring Code of Practice which means mentoring is always focussed on the mentees agenda. This means the mentor is supporting and challenging the mentee to come to their own solutions.

In other words it’s about empowering mentees to become independent and to find their own path forward.

Often I see support named as mentoring when it’s something very different. It’s a support that has immense value - it’s just not mentoring. These include:

Line managers – Skilled leaders will include mentoring behaviours and a mentoring approach in most of what they do. The issue here however is that they cannot be a mentor in these cases as they aren’t fully independent so despite their right intention they will have a bias coupled with specific objectives to achieve. 

Colleagues – Experienced colleagues are an invaluable resource to help, advise and signpost. In the right circumstances they can be a great mentor. However if they are responsible in any way for reporting, assessing, performance or giving advice and solutions to the mentee then that isn’t mentoring and it isn’t independent. It is training and guidance.

Training -  This works brilliantly alongside mentoring. This is especially when the training is up front and the mentoring is then about how to make the training work in practice. Training often uses mentoring behaviours however its focus is on transferring learning not mentoring.

Counselling -  A similar discipline to mentoring in many ways as it uses very similar skills. It’s important to recognise it is however different and often needs a person with many years of professional training and risk awareness to support in the right way. Mentors need to stay focussed on where their expertise lies and know enough to signpost on when the mentee needs this type of expert support in any counselling area.

Advising – Expert knowledge is always useful. In advice though you are telling someone something. This means it’s not mentoring behaviours that are being used.

Family and friends – They can be a brilliant source of knowledge, support and the occasional challenge! Generally too they have your best interests at heart. However their lack of independence plus probable limited  breadth of view on all your capabilities in different environments means bias and independence will be an issue.

Mentoring has amazing benefits when it’s set up and structured so everyone understands and recognises what is involved. 

I’ve explored this area some more in an interview I had with Martin Lucas.  Listen to the podcast below.

If you are looking to create or develop an effective mentoring programme in your organisation, take a look at our flexible 2019 programmes.
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Happy Mentoring 😊

These two roles add huge value within any mentoring programme to make it work well long term for everyone’s benefit.

What is a Mentor Ambassador –
An ambassador encourages both mentoring itself and a mentoring approach in all their work.
They truly recognise the value of investing in people.

I was especially delighted to receive my OBE from HRH Prince of Wales as he is a mentoring ambassador in every sense. He totally recognises the power of mentoring. He has used every opportunity to encourage formal mentoring programmes in his charity work. Through all his work he encourages people to listen and support each other to gain perspectives and to give support.

What do Mentor Ambassadors do?
In any organisation whether it be charity, not for profit or corporate, the right mentoring ambassadors can act as a huge influences for starting programmes, maintaining engagement and helping share best practice.

Ambassadors make mentoring part of what happens rather than a separate project.

Ambassadors make clear links to organisations’ goals, values and the mentoring programme.

Ambassadors make sure the profile and recognition of the importance of mentoring stays high.

Who can be a Mentor Ambassador?
All mentors and mentees naturally have the ability to be great ambassadors by sharing the experiences they have had.

It also might be that someone (often a senior leader) recognises the value mentoring gives however cannot commit to the time needed to mentor. They can still make a difference by supporting any mentoring programme as an ambassador.

What is a Mentor Champion –
A mentor champion is an experienced mentor who supports other mentors. They are sometimes known as the mentor’s mentor.

What do Mentor Champions do?
Practically a champion enables a lesser experienced mentor to feel supported as they have someone to go to for support and help.

A champion will have wider knowledge and resources that help the mentors signposting work.

A champion will create engagement for mentors that are struggling or are less confident in their role to overcome challenges which reduces risk for all.

A champion shares success story news and enables best practice sharing.

Who can be a Mentor Champion?

In most organisations we support, we often train experienced mentors to take on this role. This is flexible training or a Level 5 qualification for those that have existing mentor training and want to extend their professional qualifications by undertaking the work to create a learning portfolio.

Some organisations also choose to outsource the mentor champion role to us. This works by us sharing with them a mentor champion expert who supports those mentors, either when needed or visiting monthly. This enables the mentor champion to cover any areas the mentors need extra help with.

It doesn’t matter which option is chosen, both have benefits. It’s just so important that each mentor has this formal system of support and communication. A mentor champion role enables mentoring programmes to work long term for everyone’s benefit.

How does this link to Mentoring programme design?

There are lots of areas to consider with programme design and whilst there are key principles the areas will vary according to each programme’s needs. So we always support the design of a mentoring programme in a bespoke way.

I always find it interesting that despite the very wide range of mentor programmes we support, that there are such key principles that are relevant to all.

Martin Lucas recently interviewed me on just this topic and the podcast interview is here for you.