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Mentoring for Enterprise

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Thinking of setting up a mentoring scheme?

Here are some top tips to improve the chances of success:

  1. Educate mentees in how to choose and use a mentor – this will provide a better return on investment than training people in how to be good mentors
  2. Offer a mentor matching service – but always encourage people to look for their own mentors first – this ensures relevance
  3. Always encourage people to check out a few potential mentors rather than allocating them one
  4. Train people who have already been approached to become mentors – avoid training a whole bunch of people who want to mentor, but for whom there is no demand

Please do add more….

Knowing ‘Bugger All’

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I spent a very pleasant afternoon recently in the offices of New Start Magazine researching what makes for an inspirational or transformational relationship and I came across this wonderful quote:

In my ethnographic work, with a head full of American methodologies and theory, I thought I knew a bit about local government, urban and social policy and the theory of community and activism.  However, I knew as Betty was to tell me, “Bugger all!”.  All I knew was learned, abstract and distinct from reality.  Betty knew it from 60 years of lived experience.

Neil McInroy Chief Executive, CLES

This is why we need to have a process for community development that is not controlled by local government but by the lived experience of local people.

Hunger for Inspiration

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Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I think this offers us some powerful, but largely ignored, clues as to how we should design our enterprise development services.  We need to offer a service that helps people to seek, find and, crucially, act on their inspiration.

Their inspiration – not our policy goals.

Their inspiration – not ‘our’ desire to get ‘them’ off benefits or back into work.

Their inspiration – not our idea of ‘opportunities’ designed to meet employer demands.

Because the reality is that MOST enterprise development services are not designed to inspire.  They are designed to teach people how to commoditise themselves.  How to ‘fit in’ with the needs of the economy.

Take a good, honest look at your services.  Are they really designed to develop the users agenda – or to channel them into ours?

Perhaps this is why we are continually engaging ‘inspirational’ speakers in the false hope that we can somehow put back into our service a missing essence.  An essence that will always be missing until we change the assumptions around which our enteprise services are built.

The cornerstone of a service based on the hunger for inspiration would be a relationship in which users can be open and honest about their hopes and aspirations.  A relationship, not a workshop, or a series of workshops or advice.  A relationship.

A relationship that recognises that development takes time.  That it will feature highs and lows, lapses and relapses.

Because it is only in a relationship, characterised by compassion, competence, respect, belief, optimism, commitment and skill that people will be open and honest about their hopes and dreams and start to get in touch with what inspires them.  It is only in such a supportive relationship that people will really dare to dream and act.  It is I believe only through a relationship that people can really find inspiration and the resources for transformation.

  • So how would we market such a service?
  • Where would we find clients?
  • How would we pay for it?
  • Who would manage it?
  • What might we expect from it in terms of outputs and value for money?

But the big question that always gets asked here is about affordability.  A genuinely personalised service.  Delivered primarily through 121 conversations – isn’t that ridiculously expensive?  Well no its not.  The numbers stack up well in comparison to competing services.

The real challenge here is changing the mindset of service suppliers and commissioners.  Helping them to recognise that our communities are not full of the feckless and ignorant who need to be fixed.

They are full of people seeking inspiration and the power to act effectively on it.

Full of people who would love to become the kind of person that they know they could be.

As soon as we start designing our services around these assumptions we might get some much more positive results.

Interested?

What Inspires and Transforms Us?

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I have had several conversations with a range of professionals in regeneration and enterprise in recent weeks to explore what specific skills, qualities and behaviours are likely to help to ‘transform’ or ‘inspire’ a client.

I am interested because:

  • I have witnessed the power of personal and transformational relationships myself and think it would be useful to understand the recipes (if they exist)
  • Many claim that their mission is to ‘inspire and transform’ yet their methodologies are based on transactional consulting –  data collection, analysis and advice/recommendation.  These can be useful but I do not think they consistently (or even occasionally) inspire or transform.
  • If we are seeking to provide relationships through which others can inspire and transform their lives then perhaps we ought to have a little more organised insight into what makes the process work.

I have read a lot of the theory and it has its merits.  However I am interested now in the experience of those who have been inspired or transpired:

  • What skills and qualities were present?
  • What behaviours were used?
  • What made the inspiration/transformation happen?
  • Was the relationship face to face – or mediated through a book or other media?
  • Was it intentional – they were offering to transform and inspire an dyou were looking for it)?
  • Was it accidental – unplanned, spontaneous?

All insights welcomed and I will of course share the results!