From managing to mentoring:
The MENTOR process
Our findings
On a recurrent basis, investments dedicated to top quality trainings for managers are much higher than those dedicated to setting-up in situ new skills acquired in these trainings. Once strategies have been planned out, trainings completed and decisions made, organizations invest less energy when they reach the setting-up phase. They venture the hypothesis that changes, once decided, will take place on their own, naturally.
In addition, be it by lack of time or lack of resources, investments made prior to decision-making have now considerably decreased. Today managers are requested either to decide quickly or to make sure that the decision taken by their hierarchy turns out to be the right one.
The three goals of the MENTOR process
MENTOR allows managers to support their teammates during the critical phase of implementing important changes related to organization, strategy or behavior. They acquire valuable skills to:
Take their co-workers away from their comfort zone to an innovation level:
It takes a lot of effort to acquire new skills and to set-up organizational and strategic changes. There is a risk that teammates will fall back on old habits that are strongly grounded in a reassuring routine. The MENTOR process enables managers to support them in their new experiences and to identify and unlock resistance.
Create the proper conditions for development and knowledge transmission:
Teams have plenty of resources and expertise that are often underused. With the MENTOR process, managers can encourage the sharing of best practices, compare points of view, and provide support when difficulties arise. It fosters the emergence of new ideas among the team members or a community of experts. Therefore it optimizes all resources and various experiences available within the company.
Increase substantially the success of decisions made:
It is difficult to make decisions in a complex and uncertain environment. It requires 1) to give up part of the expertise that was traditionally allocated to decision planning, 2) to take the decision earlier in the process, and 3) to invest afterwards to make sure that the decision made was the good one. The MENTOR process sustains performance in a changing context; managers are able to decide without absolute certainty as they know that the creation of the best solution is a continuous process.
Course overview and outline
1. To master the MENTOR process in order to conduct sessions in your own organization.
Once the MENTOR process has been explained to the participants, they try it out in the following ways: 1) As group leaders, coaching the group, and 2) as team members, working on a company case involving major change issues.
2. To gain essential competencies for mentoring managerial practices
→ The Reflexive competencies:
Managers are trained to reflect upon their own practices, using models and tools to better navigate in complex situations.
Contributions of the workshop:
1 The essentials: systemic analysis, search for meaning, clarifying the request
2 The tools: Decision making, change and homeostasis, crisis management.
→The Relational competencies:
Managers are trained to enhance their social intelligence and their ability to combine technical expertise and people management in a context of matrix reporting and ambivalent instructions.
Contributions of the workshop:
1 The essentials: curiosity, questioning, the “contact cycle” experience,
resistance management, feed-back articulation.
2 The tools: The GROW coaching model, the leadership transformation model.
→The Emotional competencies:
Managers are trained to enhance their emotional intelligence and increase their capacity to focus on and reflect upon the situations as experienced by their co-workers.
Contributions of the workshop:
1 The essentials: listening and empathy, ability to step back..
2 The tools: Non Violent Communication (for “need” identification), Gestalt models (to experiment new insight) and multicultural models, including « job culture » and cross-generation management.
A proven innovative approach
The MENTOR process fosters the emergence of new « best practices », i.e., innovations, which will feed the process of change.
The MENTOR process supplements “book” learning with follow-through based on actual experiences. Better than doing case studies, the participants analyze their own cases with peers and the group leader’s feedback.
The MENTOR process encourages the use of a more authentic language that serves as a model for others: The process becomes as important as the content. Based on this experience, managers can adopt a new communication style to free up their colleagues’ potential and boost their performance.
Curriculum
It is a four day workshop (2+1+1) over a period of 4 months including learning, training and mentoring sessions with the coach.
