Mentor team

Between the third and fourth workshop meetings, each mentor team assists 12 teachers in developing innovative final projects they can incorporate into their classroom curriculum and share with their fellow teachers. When they work on their final projects, the 12 teachers do not necessarily stay in their original groups based on the grade levels they teach. The program directors try to match each teacher with one of the three mentor teams he or she has visited and found particularly useful to his or her classroom setting. 

Debbie Black, a Partners participant and sixth-grade teacher at Gerke Elementary in Franklin, Ohio, worked on a final project entitled, "What Can I Do with a Chemistry Degree " She did the project in cooperation with the mentor team from Procter Gamble (P G), led by Dr. David Henry of P G and Dr. Patricia Koochaki of Raymond Walters College in Cincinnati. 

Roles and responsibilities may not be clear. Management may only interact with mentor. Team member development may be limited. 

Mentoring is a process which supports learning and development and thus performance improvements, either for an individual, team, or business. 

The scheme was implemented and co-ordinated by a MIDAS project team, which amsisted of three women Sheila Flannery, the Project Manager, Keara Dunne, the Project Executive, and Adrienne Buchanan-Murphy, the Project Officer. Having formerly implemented a mentoring scheme at a division of Aer Rianta, Sheila Flannery possessed substantial experience with running such programs. 

Mentors were also given the chance to practice, and the whole training workshop was supplemented by question and answer sessions. For mentees, the MIDAS project team decided to run a 1-day workshop, which addressed issues such as ... 

From 1994 until recently, Lex has looked to mentoring as a means of top team development. The scheme is currently put on hold due to a pending major restructuring initiative. Unusually, they did not have a Lex mentoring program instead, the board started with a number of business issues, and used mentoring as one of the appropriate solutions. 

Each mentee was allocated to a mentor drawn from the executive team (including the Chief Executive and Chairman). Pairings were based on the mentee s development needs, the strengths and style of the mentor, an avoidance of direct line relationship, and geographical feasibility. 

The mentoring pairs met up roughly every other month and the lifespan of the relationship was determined by the participant s feelings about the value that they were gaining from it. The mentor s performance was regularly reviewed by the executive team, and mentees were regularly surveyed to understand the impact of the program on their needs. 

Decide on your development needs. For example, these could he strengthening working relationships with other team members, seeking ways to add value and revenue from current clients, listening more than talking. Discuss your Individual Development Plan with your mentor. 

The scheme is run in conjunction with the Advancement of Women Task Force (AWTF), a group dedicated to the progress of female managers. It is co-ordinated by Kristen Nostrand, P G Marketing Director, and a small team of mentors. As in most traditional mentoring schemes, mentors and mentees are matched on the basis of compatibility in terms of expectations, needs, personality and locations. The structure of the scheme is highly flexible so that the participants can respond to their own individual needs. A central coordination team ensures that the Mentor Up pairs are monitored and changed if the relationships do not prove to be successful. 

Furthermore, it is most commonly assumed that mentoring is between an older, more senior person, who is the mentor, and a younger, more junior person, who is the mentee (a myth that we tried to address in Chapter 1). However, there are many more variations of mentoring models, including e-mentoiing or team-to-team mentoring, and we wiU consider some of these variations here. 

Teams from different shifts or sites, for example, can mentor each other. This can take the form of less experienced teams seeking the expertise of more experienced teams from the same department/unit. For example, a new sales team might be mentored by a more experienced one, which could prove very beneficial for the novices performance. 

The three most common types of team mentoring, which are quite different but are all unfortunately listed imder the name of team mentoring, can be described as follows ... 

Team members might mentor each other. 

There has not been much research into the effects of these different models of mentoring. It is probable, however, that the nature of the mentoring relationship varies tremendously between them. For example, it is fair to assume that there will be differences in relationship d)mamics and power distributions between, say, traditional face-to-face mentoring that occurs on a one-to-one basis and e-mentoring or team mentoring. There might be individuals who are better able to benefit from some as opposed to other models. 

What t)rpe of mentoring model would you like to employ -one-to-one, team, reverse mentoring, or a combination of different models ... 

Mentoring models For example, one-to-one or team mentoring reverse mentoring or peer mentoring (Chapter 4)... 

Having decided on the vacancies that need filling, determine the number of people needed for each role. This should be done in accordance with the number of mentees and mentors you are planning to recruit. Then you can draw up job descriptions and selection criteria for each of the vacancies. With regard to the selection criteria for trainers, relationship supervisors and (if still necessary) the program co-ordinator, please refer back to Founding the implementation team and Table 8.1. 

Once the implementation team is in place, recruitment should first focus on the selection of mentees before turning to the selection of mentors. The reason for this lies in the fact that mentoring is set up to benefit mentees (employees with certain learning requirements). In order for mentors to develop these employees, their needs must be ascertained first, and then mentors matched to them. Let us now consider mentor and mentee recruitment in more detail, starting with the mentee. 

---