Mentoring Capacity

Shamelessly piggybacking on this week's CIPD Annual Conference, which I'm not attending this year, I'm fondly remembering the four years I worked there as a Commercial Learning Consultant, and enjoyed meeting and talking with members and clients at the conference.

I've been fortunate to be a member of, and to work with, both of my professional bodies - the #CIPD and The LPI (Learning and Performance Institute). Both roles brought together the accumulated knowledge, skills and experience I gained over 35 years as a Leader in Learning & Development.

It's those years, owning and running an IT Training business, working for other training providers and developing and leading training teams in the public, private and charity sectors, that I bring to my current role as a #ProfessionalMentor.

If you're in employment and looking for an experienced, external lens on your personal and professional development, or you're looking for work in the people professions and want to understand where you could fit, and to strategise your approach, get in touch.

I offer a no-obligation introductory chat to determine where and how I could support you getting to where you want to go. If we proceed, I'll ask you to articulate what your overarching objective/s are and what success will look like in you achieving them. That's when the work starts.

Interested? Contact me in the comments here, or via my LinkedIn Profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/niallgavin/overlay/contact-info/

Professional Mentoring Unpicked #5

Here is the next blog in my short series exploring the key aspects of mentoring others as a professional mentor.

Today I’m unpicking Key Aspect #5: Trust, Open Communication, and Mutual Respect.

“These are the foundational elements of a successful mentoring relationship. Without them, the relationship is unlikely to be effective.”

My take: Neither trust nor respect are given randomly. They are both earned.

Mentor and mentee must establish a working relationship which allows them both to be seen and to be
heard, non-judgementally and with the focus on the mentee’s development.

In an organisation’s internal mentoring programme, some of those conditions are already in place and established in the business structure. Some prior knowledge of each other may well already exist, trusted or otherwise, and an understanding of the business, the culture and the language pre-exists.

The challenge – and the opportunity - for the external mentor is to demonstrate to the mentee that they have the empathy and the experience required to support them from an external perspective, untrammelled by being embedded in the employer organisation, and informed by different professional experiences and perspectives.

The mentee should be reassured that any conversations are being held in a safe space. And that the mentor should be able to ask the difficult questions, be able to invite the mentee to open up in ways that they may not have felt able to do with an internal mentor or indeed, at all.

Agreeing to enter that relationship requires a preparedness to commit to the process, i.e. contracting, a mutual understanding about why and what the mentee is seeking support with and a mutual willingness to communicate openly and honestly, face to face or online, throughout.

Then the work can start.

Labels and Learning

Friday 24/11/17. This morning's #LDinsight tweetchat hosted by @LnDConnect started by posing the question "How can we use game mechanics in the design of learning solutions?". The resulting conversation was a delight, exemplifying for me the value of participating in such online discussions. 

Much of the conversation revolved around the terminology used in the initial question and the subsequent explanations and expansion of meaning and context from some of the more knowledgeable practitioners, matched equally by initial professions of ignorance and/or confusion about the terminology and language used, by many other participants.

I fell between the two, as usual. I am naturally curious about a lot of developments, techniques and tools in learning & development and learning technologies. But, as I say in my social media profiles, I know a little about a lot and a lot about very little. I have an awareness and a basic understanding about much of this stuff and good, practical, experiential knowledge and understanding of others. With 30 years' experience in training, L&D, Learning Technologies and HR, I am also able to reflect on that past experience, to look for relevance, context and examples and to share that information in the forum, hopefully in a relevant and helpful way.

Frequently, my examples will come from the days before the term was ever used in training. They were just things that I or others did as part of our practice, as indeed, is still the case nowadays. We didn't have a name for them then. What we have now are labels. And how we love our labels.

Labels have their uses. They help to encapsulate or headline detailed concepts, processes or procedures. They tend to be well understood by those who work in that particular field but are equally open to misinterpretation or regarded as excluding by those not in that particular cognoscenti.

But, as I said at the start of this piece, this morning's tweetchat was a delight. The game mechanic 'experts' were generous in sharing their knowledge, in breaking down the underpinning facts, in providing sources and links to further information and in acknowledging and honouring the queries, challenges, suggestions and examples from the 'non-experts' in the chat. The cross-sectoral and cross-functional perspectives brought into the conversation from all sides just added to to and enriched the conversation. 

Learning happened. 

This is the stuff you miss if you don't participate in professional tweetchats!

Thanks to @LnDconnect, who organise these weekly #LDinsight tweetchats, and to all the participants and contributors who make my Friday mornings sizzle.

PS: You'll get the full content of the discussion and the detailed learning points in the follow-up curated Storify, or go to Twitter now and search for the hashtag #LDinsight.