Business Mentoring and Mentorship:
a Golden Resource to Create
'Survive and Thrive' from 'Survival'

PAGE KEY POINTS SUMMARY

On this page we will:

* explain why investing in business mentoring and mentorship is a really smart idea and enables moving from 'survival' to 'survive and thrive'

* answer the question: 'how can mentoring help me to improve my business?'

* outline how we help businesses adopt successful business mentoring and mentorship and how our approach differs from others

* answer key questions that will help you decide whether to invest in mentoring or not and with us or not

May I ask you 7 questions which may impact on how we and you can help beneficially change your company with business mentoring?

* How much of your business's potential would you say is being realised right now?

* And, how much of your peoples’ potential?  and YOURS?

* If (or when) you could release and realise 99% of your people’s and business's potential would this be desirable and worthwhile for you?  Whatever your answer, WHY?

* What is likely to happen to your business if you do nothing other than continuing exactly as you are today?

* What is likely to happen to you? 

* Do the above questions matter to you right now or at all?

How did you feel about those questions?

and your answers or lack of answers?

Did you learn anything as you thought about them?

Why did I ask you those questions?

As a way of bringing into the front of your mind why with a brilliant client, Lubrizol, we won a UK National Training Award with an approach that had business mentoring and mentorship as a central process.

Our approach was described as 'revolutionary and inspiring' by the judges because it differed from the other consultants' more 'traditional' methods.

And it promoted the achievement of realising more potential as a business success criterion. 

Effective mentoring will help you to realise more potential, one of the major benefits of mentoring, both for your company and for your people.....and for YOU.

Two definitions for you to consider:

* potential = unrealised possibilities

* p = p - i   That is: performance = potential - interference

Do you agree?

Business Mentoring: Why Bother?

Business Mentoring and Mentorship is, at last, gaining the recognition it deserves as a golden resource to help businesses and their people move from 'survival' to 'survive and thrive'.

This has rarely been so valuable as the times in which we live now. 

The speed of dramatic change gets faster every day it seems. 

The 'future' increasingly arrives before we have adjusted to the very recent 'past' or present 'present'. 

This page is intended to help avoid overwhelm by answering the questions that will help you to decide on a steady, secure and effective path forward with business mentoring and mentorship playing a central role.

It will also help you to decide if you wish to talk with us about how we may be able to facilitate successful business mentoring with you in your business.

If you do, or have questions or suggestions, please contact me using the Contact Help Form for Dennis below for a zero cost and obligation conversation:

OK, so how can mentoring help me to improve my business?

This is the definition of mentoring that we use having evolved it over the past 30 years: 

A shared learning process to help others, to help themselves, to release and realise more of their potential (ref. Dennis Martin).

Please consider the eight major benefits below that we have experienced working with other businesses, and consider how well they may help you to address the needs of your business:

*1* more of your people's tacit potential is released and realised.

This when appropriately utilised realises more of your business's potential ultimately leading to, for example, lower costs, higher profit and excellent mentoring ROI, irrespective of the size of your business or the scope of your mentoring investment.

If your needs for business mentoring and mentorship are modest, let's say just one mentor and one mentee (you and me, for example),  the process and learning we help them go through will ensure that both of them grow and develop as a result.

As in the same way, if your needs for mentoring lead to a culture change organisational development process, all your employees involved will grow and develop to differing degrees as they release and realise more of their potential.

In the case of our client Lubizol, this saved the company from being closed down and ensured continuing employment for 70 people.

Also, as an example of the next point, the realisation of potential often manifests as continuous improvement ideas which create cost savings / profit improvements making the mentoring self-financing.

Some of our clients report cost savings in the tens of thousands of pounds plus from the improvement ideas emerging during mentoring.

It's not easy to find a better investment than that is it?

*2* people's motivation and sense of achievement and fun will be significantly strengthened

as a result of our business mentoring and mentorship process that is designed to boost intrinsic motivation, create whole brain thinking and reduce reliance on extrinsic motivators such as fear and money (if you click the link above you may have to scroll down a bit).

Helping people to learn and understand that earning 'profit' enables survive and thrive and that in turn enables employment opportunities, enthuses them to apply their motivation to help achieve your business purpose, vision, goals and objectives.

When you invest in mentoring people, you will appreciate your invaluable human assets in both senses of the word. 

Most importantly, your people will experience this appreciation when they are empowered by your actions (e.g. self-management mentoring). 

They will feel valued and they will reciprocate with, for example, cost saving and quality improving ideas, high performance self-managed teams, increased initiative, creativity and flexibility. 

Such cultural changes can lead to significant benefits / ROI such as becoming the 'employer of choice' able to recruit appropriate talent for your business and people to thrive in the future they have helped to create as a result of business-mentoring.

What is a mentor?

*3* people 'manage' their own lives and are accountable for the results as they live with the consequences they were responsible for causing. 

They raise children and plan, pay for their higher education.  They understand debt and borrowing when they have a mortgage. They plan holidays, savings, health care, they deal with family and personal crises etc. etc.

You and I know this.  I see the life-skills mentioned above as a wasted opportunity in too many companies still relying on 'top-down' command and control management.

We won't waste this golden opportunity, if we work together we will agree with you to organise your mentoring on a self-managed basis which respects the life-skills your people bring to their workplace for free.

As an illustration, in practice, it might occur something like this:

you identify a mentee with potential and a mentor with the tacit knowledge and skills to help her or him achieve more.

You also arrange that the mentee and mentor (and leaders) will have some learning sessions (maybe with us?) so that they understand the purpose and the process of mentoring and, in particular, the success criteria and its implications for business growth.

You communicate to them something along these lines:

'Now this mentoring opportunity belongs to you, the mentee and the mentor, and you have the authority to decide how you wish to do it, to take decisions that may be necessary, and to spend money to support your progress.

None of the above requires any management pre-approval, permission or control. 

It is up to you to make it work, including all the communications that will be needed.

It is YOUR mentoring process and we will support YOUR decisions.

If you need more information, help or resources, you must ask for them, we will not 'spoon feed' you.

For example, you'll probably want to ask the finance manager how much money is in your budget or you may wish to talk with HR about making changes. 

Finally, the company is investing in you and we will want to see a return on that investment, whether it be positive or negative. 

So, you will be accountable for your actions directly to me. 

Let us know how you would like this to happen.

Do you have any immediate questions?

Have fun'.

If they do ask questions, your first reply to almost any question is a chance to illustrate how self-management will work by saying either: 'what do you think? or 'good (or interesting) question.  Why did you ask that?', before you give your answer.

We've never yet had a mentor and mentee(s) refuse this arrangement. 

It works wonders for their self-confidence, self-image, it trusts them, treats them like adults and it shows them significant, genuine respect.

But, however it occurs, self-management of mentorship is one of the big 'secrets of success' in our mentoring programmes that work and produce great results.

Below is an image of the Golden Triangle of Communications: a key model we use in the training of mentors, mentees and leaders

A quick check: how are we doing?

Well, the 3 business mentoring and mentorship deliverables I have described so far produce considerable benefits to you, your people and your business.

WHY?

Because the benefits of business mentoring and mentorship are transferrable and tangible.

When you and your people come to work you bring your hands, heart and brain. 

How can it make sense, especially economic sense, to say in effect to your people: leave your brain and heart outside when you come here to work?

When you synchronise people's head, heart and hands with your business vision through effective mentoring, it's no longer just you running the business and feeling lonely at times, all of your employees are also aligned and helping to run the business, and enjoying it (our learning experiences will show mentors and mentees and leaders how to do this).  

This puts you in a different league now compared to many businesses which have bored employees, only there for the money, just going through the motions of doing 'the job'

If by any chance that describes your employees, business mentoring and mentorship is a powerful, positive process that will un-bore them, create intrinsic motivation which is much more valuable than money, and enable them to manage their own jobs making the jobs more interesting and enhancing and fun.

Which means that people will enjoy coming to work and will be enhanced by doing so.

They will have a positive attitude and a feeling of 'ownership' and alignment  towards helping 'their' business succeed.

This will give you an immense competitive edge / advantage because it will be noticed by customers, shareholders, suppliers and other stakeholders. 

It will. 

I've seen business mentoring and mentorship help it to happen many times.

*4* you and your people will learn from us about complex adaptive systems.

What emerges from a complex adaptive system is unknowable and unpredictable, until it happens.

For a more detailed explanation please click the link to go to our Complex Adaptive Systems page, it is well worth a visit.

We have evolved and learned a far more effective approach to help the mentee help himself or herself deal appropriately with complex adaptive systems.

And that is to enable the mentee and mentor (and their Leader(s) to take full ownership of the mentoring process and to self-manage it as the complex adaptive system that it is.

Our training will help them learn not to self-manage a complex adaptive system as if it were a linear system and vice versa.

Learning from business mentoring and mentorship that your business is a complex adaptive system will enable you and your people to see it in a different light, respect the complexities involved and feel motivated to help improve all aspects of it as a means of thriving rather than just surviving.

Does that sound like a good return on investment to you?

*5* you and your people will learn about your thinking preferences. 

In our training experiences for mentors, mentees and leaders, we use the Ned Herrmann whole brain thinking model and the HBDI (Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument) to create participants' thinking preferences profiles.

Click the link above to see an example of my thinking profile.

We use HBDI to match mentors' and mentees' thinking styles and to deliberately mis-match them sometimes to create rich learning and to learn to value differences.

*6* you and your employees will learn how to move from a 'downward overlapping' culture to an 'upward overlapping' culture using business mentoring and mentorship 

This is one of the big benefits that often emerges from developing self-management in your culture as a result of business mentoring and mentorship.

In many organisations the culture may be described as 'downward overlapping'.

That is, at the bottom of the hierarchy employees often are doing their jobs as a pair of 'hands' but with not much, if any, involvement of their brains and hearts.

WHY?

Because the company has employed others to tell them what to do (e.g. supervisors). 

Not only that, they've employed others to tell the others what to tell the employees what to do (e.g. middle managers).

This can be exacerbated in a company with a hierarchy 6 or 7 layers deep, as I'm sure you can imagine.

In practice this tends to create a very expensive downward overlapping culture.

So, the employees at the bottom do what they are told by supervisors who are really super-operators as they are doing part of the operator's job (usually the more interesting part).

And the middle-managers are really super-supervisors because they are doing part of the supervisor's job.

This can go all the way up to the C.E.O. or business owner because all decisions are 'delegated' upwards to her or him by his or her direct reports to minimise risks to them or to please the boss.

Well, this matters because it may mean that everyone in management is looking down into the business and partly doing the job below them (i.e. downward overlapping)

Which raises an interesting question:  who then is looking up and out of the business to the future opportunities and threats that will unfold?

Business mentoring and mentorship inspired self-management can free up the C.E.O.'s and small business owners' time to look after the business's future because employees who are aligned are looking after the business's today (i.e. upward overlapping)

Now what is that worth as a return on investment? 

Especially when you stop downward overlapping (which wastes a massive amount of money) and start upward overlapping with self-management which often creates a lot of money.

Potentially it is priceless.

*7* business mentoring and mentorship stimulates the removal of interference.

Our bespoke and different approach has taught us that 'the best laid plans of mice and men' don't always work out as expected.

AND WHY IS THAT YOU MAY WELL ASK

Mentoring being a complex adaptive system, there could be many reasons but one of the main ones we have seen many times is a too narrow boundary around the planning design stage.

Our response is to diagnose factors that may hinder and /or help the mentoring process that are either in the external environment of the mentee's and mentor/s  and / or is in the internal environment of either or both. 

In particular, the simple equation springs to mind:

p = p - i 

which means what?

PERFORMANCE = POTENTIAL - INTERFERENCE

So, if we can help people release and realise more of their potential through mentoring, we must improve performance?

Hmm, maybe, but complex adaptive systems are unknowable and unpredictable, so maybe not, especially if the interference remains unchanged or gets worse.

The mentoring may be great but may still be sub-optimised by unchanged interference.

HOW COME?

Well, our experience coincides with what Deming once said: 'our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people'.

Interference, often introduced to control people's behaviour, may include, for example:

* hourly pay and overtime (we helped the individual Pfizer and Lubrizol plants we worked with to move everyone to salary and abandon overtime)

* job descriptions (except where mandatory for regulatory or safety reasons) which are, of course, static documents trying to describe an un-static situation and, in so doing, they legitimise what isn't on the job description - ever heard someone say, 'it's not my job. It isn't in my job description'?

* unnecessary rules, often based on the 2.5% 'idiots' you may have which insults the 97.5% of 'good' people. It's better to base your rules on your 'good' folks and deal with the 'idiots' on a case-by-case basis.

WHY?
Because if you base your rules on the 'idiots', you may inadvertently communicate the message to your 'good' people that you think they are also 'potential idiots' and that you don't trust them either.

* a deep hierarchical organisation structure which may make all middle managers 'messengers' who fear 'letting go' and / or making decisions and this can lead to a limiting culture of 'yes men and women'

* I had thought this was declining after the UK's 'sick man of Europe' period,,,,but some of it is still around I think: 'them and us' attitudes, especially troublesome when coming from 'management'

* lack of trust anywhere but especially problematic if evident from the top down.

We define trust as: 'I know you will not take unfair advantage of me'.

Now, if we can remove the above interference AND mentor people to release and realise more of their potential, as we've experienced with our clients Lubrizol and Pfizer, record breaking performance can become the norm.

IMPOSSIBLE!!!, you may be thinking?

NO, not at all.  We've done it to varying degrees with our clients. 

And, our bespoke and different approach will help you too, if you wish?

Interference factors that may be in the mentee's mind is a major 'target' that mentoring should address as a priority.

Our mentor. mentee and leader group training sessions is tailor-made to help with this and the skills involved, if needed and effectively applied, become another 'secret of success'.

If you have to 'manage' people in your business you are wasting their time and yours.......and a lot of money.

If your people can manage their own lives (see above), surely they  can manage their job and their owned mentoring programme.

My experience is that they sure can and will if inhibitors are removed and empowerment is encouraged and resourced.

Not only that, but your people will enjoy it and usually make a better job of it than supervisors and middle managers did.

Trust your people, support them and they will surprise you...and often surprise themselves.

They don't need managing, they largely know how to self-manage, what they need is leadership.

Managers may feel the need to be in control, to organise and direct.  To exert some power. 

This is a problem for most middle managers who tend to pass messages up and down the hierarchy without making many decisions.

And, in order to keep their jobs, can turn into 'yes-men' or yes-women' with their boss whilst keeping their heads down below the parapet.

The definition of a leader we use is: someone to whom others turn for help, advice and guidance.

Very similar to the definition of a mentor isn't it?

I wonder why?

Click the link to go to our Leadership and Mentoring page for more details

So, by definition, if your people can and will self-manage (as we have discussed earlier), there is no need to manage them in a traditional way.

This releases middle-managers and supervisors to move into leadership, thus releasing and realising more of their latent potential and YOURS.

In addition, another benefit of this culture shift is that complex adaptive systems respond well to a leadership approach and badly to a traditional command and control management approach.

So that's a win-win double boost to return on investment.

In addition to the above, because mentoring is a complex adaptive system, some or all of the following are often reported as benefits emerging from business mentoring and mentorship:

* well received and well used knowledge and skills learning because it is tailored to your specific needs and situation

* new ideas, innovation and creativity arising from the mentor and mentee/s contribution

* cost reducing continuous improvement ideas and problem solving effectiveness all of which may stimulate and / or contribute to helping the business improve profitability and grow - and may make mentoring self-financing

* 'it can be lonely at the top from time to time' and mentoring can create support, encouragement and accountability for all involved, including YOU

* mentoring often creates new networks or refresh existing ones through common purpose, communications, high support-high challenge (see model below), releasing and realising potential (so the 'impossible', 'you can't do that' is made redundant by achievements), all of which leads to synergy: 2 + 2 = 5; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; no one of us is as smart as all of us.

The image below is High Support-High Challenge, a key model in our training

In essence, our business mentoring and mentorship approach means that we’ll work together through a four stage process we call the Four D.s:

• Diagnosis– e.g. joint assessment of your needs and priorities; on both content and process; including scope - is it a mentoring programme you need or a small business coach or, for example, an organisational development project (e.g. culture change)?

• Design – e.g. based on the diagnosis outcomes, clarification of success criteria and planning an approach and programme that will satisfy your specific needs

• Delivery of the designed plan – e.g. use of a wide range of creative approaches that will match and stretch people’s thinking and learning preferences and comfort zones; provision of real close-up help, guidance and mentoring for success.
• This stage includes the Herrmann thinking preferences profile for participants.   
• Click the link to see an example of my profile: 
  

• Development – e.g. evaluation of results; trouble shooting, where necessary; assessment of return on investment; learnings and recommendations for next action.

Please click the link to see more details: small business mentor

Our subsequent training of mentors, mentees and leaders together in a group includes the Four D.s model above as a useful tool for effective mentoring whatever the context.

All of the eight major return on investments and business performance boosters listed above are there not as maybes or wishes, they are there because we have experienced them happening, and helped create them, when helping companies to implement business mentoring and mentorship.

Does this mean that every company that does mentoring will benefit as described above?

NO.

WHY NOT?

Well, we have to recognise the scale of the mentoring involved. 

If it is modest, say one mentor and one mentee, unless that comprises the entire payroll of a small business, and it could, of course, then it is unlikely that that scale of mentoring will change a larger business culture. 

Whereas, in a large organisation that has a mentoring scheme for a large population of its employees, mentoring we would say is a powerful, positive catalyst and entry-point for culture change because it will stimulate the changes described above.

However, I think if you are considering whether to invest time and money in implementing mentoring in your company, it is worth reading the eight major benefits description above as part of your research.

It is also worth reading The Lubrizol Story, parts one and two.

Treat all 3 as 'statements of potential' that are available to you in your business to some degree or other.

Remember, potential is unrealised possibilities, and achieving even, say, 30% of what's described above and which moves your business closer to 'survive and thrive' and further away from just 'survival' is an achievement worth having.

And that achievement may become the next starting stepping stone to repeat the process and grab another 30%.

That sounds like 'success' to me as it's a process dealing with a complex adaptive system.

Is it 'easy'?

I'd say, from my experience, that if you relax, give it your best shot, 'let go' and trust people and yourself, enjoy the process and have fun doing it, it won't feel like work in the traditional sense of the word.

OK, hopefully the above has helped you to answer the question: how can mentoring help me to improve my business?

It's quite likely that this business mentoring and mentorship page has also raised a bunch of other questions in your mind.  This can cause what I describe as the 'mentoring maze' of it seems more complicated than I thought.

If we haven't adequately helped you to answer the question, or our answer has amazed you, please contact me using the Contact Help Form for Dennis below and I'll be delighted to respond to what we've missed - zero cost or obligation involved for you.

We Have Seven Key Values?

We have Seven Key Values that are intended to benefit you and us.

To see these values please click on the link to go to Our Seven Values page.

go back to our HOME PAGE                                       go to our PRIVACY POLICY

I you would like more information relating to this page, please click any or all of the links below:

* why be a mentor

* leadership and mentoring

* letter to a mentee

* letter to a mentor

* what is a mentor

Page summary

On this business mentoring and mentorship page we have:

* explained why investing in business mentoring and mentorship is a really smart idea and enables moving from 'survival' to 'survive and thrive'

* answered the question: 'how can mentoring help me to improve my business?'

* outlined how we help businesses adopt successful business mentoring and mentorship and how our approach differs from others

* answered key questions that will help you decide whether to invest in mentoring or not and with us or not

We've covered a lot of ground on this page and I just want to THANK YOU for visiting my web site and reading this page. 

Your attention is much appreciated.

I hope you found the page as enjoyable, worthwhile and interesting reading it as I did writing it.

Kindest regards,

Dennis