Use these activities to promote understanding of mentoring - and how to evaluate it. Discover ways of linking mentoring to other development activities such as performance reviews and personal development planning.
The 20 activities are divided into three main sections. The first provides an introduction to mentoring and how to brief proteges; the second explores core skills such as one-to-one coaching, motivating the protege and giving and receiving feedback; the third concentrates on specialised mentoring skills such as career counselling .
Learning applications include:
- mentoring
- coaching
- career management
- counselling
- project management
- stress management
- problem solving
- giving and receiving feedback
- training needs analysis
List of Activities
INITIAL BRIEFING
1. What is Mentoring?
An activity to ensure that all participants have a common understanding of the concept: what it is and what it is not.
2. What do I do?
An exercise which demonstrates to existing and potential mentors that the sub-skills are similar to those which they use as part of their everyday management or supervisory roles. Its aim is to both develop existing mentors and to reassure new or potential mentors.
3. Identifying Learning Opportunities
An activity which helps to identify the different on-the-job learning opportunities for people which are both available and which have been effective within their own organisation. Delegates can then go on to explore ways of creating such opportunities for their proteges.
4. Evaluating Mentoring
This activity will appeal to trainers and managers alike since it helps to identify the different ways in which mentoring systems can be monitored and evaluated and evidence collected which can demonstrate the benefits accrued.
5. Creating Links
An activity which allows mentors to create links between mentoring and other development systems which might involve them or their proteges, such as appraisal systems, succession planning systems etc.
6. Briefing Protégés
This activity will help the mentors (and trainers) to prepare for the first sessions to be held with their proteges, either individually or via group briefings. It will give mentors the chance to consider the information needs of their protégés.
CORE SKILLS
7. Identifying Development Needs
An opportunity to agree ways and systems to help the identification of training and development needs in proteges: the information needed, the sources of such information and mechanisms available to tap those sources.
8. One-to-One Coaching - Reproductive Tasks
How to help proteges by training them in informal, one to one situations at work. This activity will concentrate on the coaching situation where the task is reproductive i.e. there is one correct way of carrying it out.
9. One-to-One Coaching - Productive Tasks
How to provide help for proteges where the task to be learned has more than one method or where the learner is already better at the task than the coach: a productive task.
10. Counselling Skills
A series of activities which starts by defining counselling, looks at the micro-skills involved (listening, focusing, drawing out, paraphrasing and suspending judgement), and then briefly explores the styles available (and their applications).
11. Managing Learning Projects
Recognising that many mentoring systems use work-based tasks, experiential learning - or projects - as learning vehicles for the protégés, this activity will look at the management of such projects; identifying, specifying, monitoring and reviewing them.
12. Giving and Receiving Feedback
A vital sub-skill in any developmental activity, but of particular importance in mentoring where the mentor's views are often seen as carrying additional weight because of their status, position, expertise or dispassionate position. This activity both establishes a framework for giving feedback and gives development, practise and feedback on giving feedback.
13. Motivating the Protege
A chance to visit (or re-visit for many managers) aspects of motivation at work and to identify the actions which mentors can take in helping to maintain the enthusiasm and motivation of their protégés.
SPECIALISED SKILLS
14. Managing Mentoring Meetings
An exercise which help delegates to develop their skills in managing both the content and the process of the mentor/protege meetings which are often multi-faceted with little apparent task urgency and hence a great risk of going off at a tangent.
15. Gaining Rapport
This exercise will help the participants to establish exactly what is meant by the phrase and to explore and develop the micro-skills involved, both verbal and non-verbal.
16. Performance Aids
A practical session which provides participants with a number of ideas and advice on the production of aids which they could produce and use to help to learn particular skills or knowledge outside of coaching sessions.
17. Career Management
A series of exercises and practical sessions in which careers are defined, influences identified and future career opportunities mapped out. Delegates can also be given the opportunity to practise some career counselling in either simulated or 'real' circumstances.
18. Managing Stress
An activity which helps to identify the symptoms, causes and consequences of stress. It also gives participants an opportunity to develop and share coping mechanisms.
19. Managing the Politics!
A practical look at the management of organisational politics which surround mentoring systems. This activity also gives mentors the opportunity to explore ways in which they can help their protégés to cope and survive in organisational politics.
20. Problem Solving in Mentoring
This activity is not looking at the management process of problem solving but is looking at the sorts of things which can go wrong in mentoring systems and helping the mentors to be 'forewarned and forearmed' with a range of practical solutions.
