​Conversations are the webs which help us reconnect in today’s workspace. What are the conversations which are going to be valuable to have as you move forward? As a coach I am always amazed at the myriad of different types of conversations which are available to us, helping us to grow and change. This might include:
Mentoring conversations
Coaching conversations
Performance conversations
Team Meetings
Reflection sessions
​
What else?

Article by Jennifer Britton, Potentials Realized | Mentor Roadmap

©Jennifer Britton 2014, All Rights Reserved

Mentoring plays a key role in the development of talent within organizations, and is often overlooked or underutilized. Increasingly organizations are viewing it as an important part of their succession and talent management process, in addition to being a useful approach during onboarding. While many mentoring programs focus on growing the next generation of leaders, mentoring programs can also support career transition across industries and diversity initiatives within organization. Mentoring plays an important role in building relationships across and organization and/or industry.

Throughout the mentoring relationship mentors provide opportunities for the protégé to learn based on real life experiences. A powerful tool for understanding organizational culture. Mentors also help protégés understand really how things get done, and the politics in an organization. Mentors can be a powerful, and positive, person in your network.  How might mentoring benefit your organization?

As you start to establish mentoring within your organization and formalize a mentoring process, there are several areas you will want to consider. These include:

Clarify the roles and responsibilities of mentors and mentees/protégés - In successful mentoring relationships expectations are clear. The roles and responsibilities of both the mentor and mentee are discussed at the start of the mentoring conversation. Pairings know who will be initiating meetings, and what type of support each party wants and can provide to the other. Mentoring can benefit from a clearly defined start and end to the process. Early on create expectations round how frequently partners should meet for. As part of the process of mentoring it can be useful to hold a short kick-off session, which may also involve some training and expectation setting for the wider group of mentors and protégés.

Have mentees set the goals - Having two or three specific goal areas in focus helps to structure the mentoring conversation. Mentees should spend time at the start of the process to identify and share with the mentor key areas they would like support in. It will also be useful to have the portage set the agenda each conversation. Some mentors may ask protégés to email focus areas few days before the session, whereas others may be more comfortable addressing the mentees needs in the moment.

The life cycle of the mentoring relationship has several distinct phases. In the first meeting, mentors and mentees will want to share more about their background, and their expectations for mentoring process. At this time is also very useful to identify together when, where and how you will meet. Be clear with each other on what’s going to work best for both of you. Some compromise and flexibility may be required on both of your parts. Another alternative may be to schedule some of your meetings by phone or skype, particularly if you are situated in different offices or geographic locations.  Discussion around topics such as confidentiality is also important as the mentor will likely be sharing real examples based on their experience.

As you get to know each other and connections progress, check in around what’s working well with the mentoring relationship and what is not. It is important to be honest and frank with each other, particularly if expectations are not aligned.

As the mentoring relationship comes to a close, build in time to have the mentee identify their learning from the process. We often say that mentoring is a two-way street and hopefully mentors will learn as much from their experience as well. As a mentor, consider what your greatest learning has been throughout your conversations. At the end of a mentoring process in your organization it can be useful to bring mentors and mentees together, even virtually, for the sharing of lessons learned, best practices and other evaluation feedback. This can feed forward into the next cohort of mentoring conversations. Several of the protégés may opt to become a mentor in future program rounds.

Core Skills in the Mentoring Process

There are several skill sets which enhance the mentoring process. As a mentor, lead with core skills such as listening and powerful questions. Mentoring is not just about sharing your experience, it is also about supporting the mentee with new insights and perspectives around their work. Listen closely for what they need. Do not assume you know.

Mentoring is a conversation to support the mentee in also identifying what they know and where they want to go.  In asking questions it is often useful to lead with a WHAT? For example, “What’s another perspective around that ?”OR “What did you learn from that experience?”. WHAT questions invite conversation and dialogue, whereas WHY questions may put people on the defensive, and HOW questions often lead us into process and thinking about how things are done.

Other core skills which mentors may use include sharing observations and providing feedback. Sometimes mentees may also want you to be an accountability partner.  Others may want to be acknowledged. Ask what they would like from the mentoring process and what role they would like you to play. Finally inquire about the approaches they would like you to incorporate - providing stories, leading you to resources, providing links to best practices.

In closing, successful mentoring partnerships benefit both the mentor and mentee. It is an underutilized approach for growth and development. Consider how you can expand mentoring within your organization or industry.

Enjoy your conversations,
Jennifer

About the Author

Jennifer Britton, MES, PCC, CPT is the founder of Potentials Realized, a performance improvement company focusing on leadership development, teamwork, and coaching skills training. We have designed award winning mentor programs, and provide Mentor Program Support and Training through the Mentor RoadMap ™ . Jennifer  is the author of Effective Group Coaching (Wiley, 2009) and From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching (Jossey-Bass, 2013). For more information about mentoring skills training and support contact Jennifer Britton at (416)996-8326. You can visit us online at Potentials Realized.com which includes the Teams365 blog for Leaders, and the MentorRoadMap.com.  You can email us at info@potentialsrealized.com.

​One of the areas many readers enjoy is the questions provided in Reconnecting Workspaces, which they can apply to their own work. 

I thought I would zoom us into page 289 of the book today which includes 6 questions you might want to use to get you mentoring conversations going:

What do you want to focus on today? What’s going to be a good outcome fro our call?
What have been your biggest successes as a team leader/professional?
What were the ingredients that have shaped your success? What has gotten in the way?
What have been the most important moved you have made in your career?
What resources do you recommend I tap into?
What’s the most important piece of advice you would have for new team leaders?
I hope that these questions may spark some new conversations for you. Enjoy!

With best wishes,
Jennifer

Today’s Teams365 blog posts was written by Potentials Realized Team Lead, Kathy Vaughan. 
​
The term “hybrid” finds its roots in the latin term ibrida referring to the offspring of two dissimilar animals (the offspring of two dissimilar animals, specifically the tame sow and the wild boar).  It was not in use much until the mid-1800 where its was largely used in the agricultural realm. 

As we enter Q2 2022, the verdict is that the hybrid work model is here to stay. In fact, the World Economic Forum states that it will be the default work strategy by 2024 as a response to changing nature of work, talent recruitment and retention, and the ongoing shifts in our world from economic to political.  Default does not, however, mean defined.  We are no longer talking about mating two species together. Today we use hybrid in a much different way - 3D at scale human interaction supported by technology. With regards to the model of work, it refers to a model of engaging people to carry out activities aligned to a purpose where they are both in person and remote.

3 barriers to successful hybrid work are 1) lack of workplace innovation, 2) insufficient oversight, and 3) cultural shifts.

Using personas to explore the different employee experiences (current and future) is one way to start the conversation with your team and organization.  Persona-based work models allow you to gain information and insight about the needs, wants, aspirations, and challenges of different workers and then to build a response tailored to different categories.  A 2020 Boston Consulting Group report stated using a person-based hybrid work strategy to design and roll out specific, tailored flexible options to each employee personal group had many positive impacts including 10% reduction in turnover, as well as increased productivity.

Potentials Realized has long used personas as a way to tell the story of remote workers and more recently Reconnecting Workspaces.  The Digital Dozen, pioneered in Jennifer’s writing starting in 2019, was the first group of personas used across different programs to support understanding personas, connecting to participants lived experience, and finding a way forward to support leaders, managers and peers in the hybrid work space.

In 2022 we will be evolving our persona-based universe even further. We aim to support you and your teams to hold authentic conversations about connection, trust and accountability, autonomy and growth as we gain greater understanding of our own thoughts and preferences to the evolving hybrid experience and then looking to co-create workable solutions for those with whom we work.
Join us on Thursday May 12th  at 12 noon ET to learn more as we take a deeper dive in call 6 of 7 of our 18th Anniversary Calls to explore the Hybrid Work Styles Quiz.

​This chapter’s brain tip explores how to expand the space for possibilities. Moving into a mindset of hope and possibility is key to thriving in a disrupted environment.

For many years, Richard Boyatzis has explored the impact of coaching on the brain. In his work he has isolated the impact of certain questions to what is known of the Positive Emotional Attractor network (PEA).
Asking questions like “What’s possible?” and “What if you won 50 million dollars?” activates the PEA.

When the Positive Emotional Attractor network is activated, so is the parasympathetic network,
which is the part of the brain responsible for compassion, flow, and thriving.

In contrast, questions that start with Why tend to activate the Negative Emotional Attractor network, or literally “close the mind.”

What changes do you want to make to your questions with the PEA/NEA in mind?

Enjoy your conversations,
Jennifer

​Questioning forms the backbone of the coaching conversation. Questions are the mechanism to expand awareness, gain new insights, and create new connections.

Powerful questions usually are short (five to six words in length), and are open-ended (note how many start with What). Powerful questions may expand awareness, synthesize ideas, or
help connect the dots.

Let’s look at these examples:
• Where are you now?
• What’s important?
• Where do you want to be?
• What will help you move from A to B?
• What’s important about this end result?
• What’s going to accelerate things?
• What will success look like?
• What might get in the way?
• What are you committed to doing, no matter what?
• What is it going to take to get there?
• What do you need to say “no” to?
• What learning are you having?

Mike Rother, in his article “Toyota Kata,” shares these five questions for managers to use:205
1. What is the target condition?
2. What is the actual condition now?
3. What obstacles do you think are preventing you from reaching the target condition?
Which one are you addressing now?
4. What is your Next Step? (next PDCA/experiment) What do you expect?
5. When can we go and see what we have learned from taking that step?

Note the variance in language. Key to the coaching process is adjusting the language to have
greatest impact with the person being coached.

A final model which can be useful to keep in mind when you go about the coaching process is
the GROW Model, created by Alexander, Fine, and Whitmore. GROW stands for:
Goals: What is important?

Reality: Where are you now? Where do you want to be?
Options: What will help you move from A to B?
Wrap-up: What will you do? By when? How will I know?

Enjoy your conversations,
Jennifer

As we step into May have you taken a look a yesterday’s Teams365 blog post with our month end focus? Be sure to take a look at the post.
This past week we continued our dive into Coaching and Mentoring, with a focus on:
Saturday – Week in Review
Friday’s flashback to Teams365 #191 – What Coaching Is, and What Coaching Is not.
Thursday’s sharing of Chapter 15’s Team Tool – Mentoring Log from Reconnecting Workspaces
Wednesday’s focus on Remote Pathways podcast episode #59 on Productivity in the Hybrid World
Tuesday’s focus on Remaining Visible in the Remote World
Monday’s weekly reading from Reconnecting Workspace

​It’s hard to believe that it’s the end of another month. Where has the time flown? Has “April showers brought May flowers” where you are in the world?

Today I hope you will take a few minutes to look back at the month nd consider these retrospective and planning questions
Reflecting on the month of April:
What were my major achievements this month?
What do I want to celebrate?
As I consider my goals (and resolutions) I made at the start of the year, how am I doing with these on a scale of 1-10? Which ones are becoming new habits or something I can check off?
Which goals need to be let go of or changed?
What habits have supported me this month?
As a leader, what have I noticed about my team this month?
As a leader, what notes should I make about performance issues (if I haven't done it already!)
The thing that has helped me be most productive this month has been ______
The thing that has helped me be most successful this month has been ______
The thing that has helped me be happiest this month has been ________
The thing that has helped me be most healthy has been _______
What have I noticed about my work/productivity/results and/or relationships during the winter months (if you are in the northern hemisphere) or summer (if you are in the southern hemisphere)?
How I’m doing with my theme of the year (how I am living it, embodying it).

Looking ahead to May:
The project I want to get started
The project I most want to wrap up is...
I want to leave ______ in the month of April:
My priorities are:
Our team priorities are:
My goals are
My teams goals are:
I want to......
I'll be really happy at the end of May when….

​I’m reaching back to a blog post from 2014 which dove into how to define coaching. I think it’s as appropriate and important to revisit today as it was years ago. Let’s take a look at what I wrote:
l sorts of behaviors get “labelled” coaching in today’s business environment. I often hear a wide range of descriptors when I deliver coaching skills training with leaders  - new, seasoned, and emerging leaders.

After leading dozens of coaching skills training over the years one of my favorite coaching descriptions comes from a former SME , Doug McLaren, who I co-faciltiated with for years. As he said, Co-Facilitation is a “Conversation with Intent”. You can find more about what I write about coaching for leaders in chapter 10 of in my latest book From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching.

Whether you are a leader coaching their team, and internal coach “professionally coaching “ others, or an external coach working with a team:

What coaching is…..

A conversation with intent

Focused on the present and geared towards the future

Focused on performance and relationships

Grounded in awareness, goals and action

Elicits what the person being coached knows

What coaching is not….

Simply a conversation with no direction

Focused on the past

Navel gazing

Telling others what to do

Mentoring, Advising, Consulting

In fact, the International Coach Federation identifies competencies for coaching, in which all coaching models should be grounded. These range from ethics, to designing the coaching agreement, to listening, goal setting and planning, designing actions, and creating awareness. Personally, I use these in all training of coaches I undertake - leaders, as well as the thousands of coaches I have supported in the last fifteen years as they develop their own group and team coaching work.

How do you define what coaching is? What coaching is not? Why is this important in your work?
Enjoy the conversation,
Jennifer

​Over the course of a mentoring pairing, you may have a multitude of conversation touchpoints. It is common to hear that in both mentoring and coaching conversations, it’s unclear what was covered and agreed to over time. The Mentoring Log is a quick form to capture key learning, and identify focus areas for the conversation. This log can be reproduced as needed.

Log of Meetings and Other Activities

Date/Time/Location:_______________________________________________

Focus:








Comments During/After Meeting


Follow-up Steps

Mine:


Mentor/Protégé: