One of our mentees said something great to us just recently: “So far every discussion has provided significant value for me and triggered a number of activities that continue to progress”. We hope gives everyone involved in the scheme a sense of just what it is all about!
It’s been a busy period with the CIO Mentoring Scheme over the last twelve months. We’ve had a number of pairings reaching the end of their first round of CIO and next generation leader mentoring, with many renewing to go again, plus several new fantastic mentors and mentees joining the Scheme.
At our last Mentoring Community Day we heard some great stories and updates from the mentors and mentees present. The feedback was really encouraging and demonstrated the value many of the pairings are getting from the experience.
They loved the simplicity:
- “The strength is in the informality of the scheme”;
- “It’s a conversation with someone with real experience, not giving you an MBA style two by two framework to make every point”.
So many of the participants are learning things that they are also able to take back to their organisations and own teams. Mentoring certainly isn’t about fixing things that are wrong, rather about widening perspectives and engaging in conversations that are inspring.
We also enjoyed an afternoon skills session with James Caplin on Powerful Networking which was really well received by mentors and mentees alike. Community Days contain some mentor and mentee sharing and networking in the morning and a skills session in the afternoon open to all. Future topics for skills sessions are scheduled to include Influencing Skills and Decision Making – these topics as well as Powerful Networking and more can be delivered as in-house workshops with teams if you are inspired.
The participants asked us to continue to make it easy for successful leaders to pass their wisdom on to the next generation and not burden you with too much process. Our communication and quality control will therefore continue to be light-touch, whilst ensuring everyone is getting exactly what they need. Coaching Cloud continues to be available for those who are regularly using it, though we appreciate that not everyone has the time to log into it and update things. It is, of course, optional and we will continue to support those of you who are using it.
We will be updating and improving our Mentoring website pages over the coming weeks too, including making some helpful documents and guidelines available – more on that to follow soon.
If you are already involved in the scheme we look forward to continuing working with you in 2015 and hopefully seeing you on one of the Community Days. If you are not, but would like to know more about it, contact us for an informal discussion or more information.