Why your organisation needs a mentoring programme.

In today’s competitive work environment attracting and retaining staff is hugely important. One of the strategies that is being increasingly used in recruitment and retention packages are mentorship programmes that can offer a wide range of benefits for both mentors and mentees.

In the past mentoring was often seen as a great way to help new employees integrate into the workforce but a strong mentorship programme can do so much more

• Knowledge Transfer - Mentors provide valuable insights and practical knowledge gained from their own experiences which can help helping mentees navigate challenges more effectively. Mentors can also have industry-specific knowledge and a background in best practices that may not be available through formalised study.

• Career Development - As well as providing guidance on setting and achieving career goals, identifying strengths and weaknesses, and developing the skills needed for success, mentors can introduce mentees to their professional networks, expanding their opportunities for career advancement and collaboration.

• Personal Development - Mentors help mentees identify and work on areas for skill improvement and personal and professional development. Their encouragement and constructive feedback helps mentees gain in confidence and self-assurance.

• Feedback and Support - Mentors offer constructive feedback and guidance which helps mentees recognise areas for improvement and how to enhance their performance. Mentors also serve as a source of encouragement during challenging times, offering a listening ear and advice to navigate both professional and personal issues.

• Increased Productivity - Mentors assist mentees in aligning their goals with the broader objectives of the organisation, contributing to overall productivity and success. Learning from a mentor's experiences can also help mentees avoid common pitfalls and achieve their goals more efficiently.

• Diversity and Inclusion - Mentorship can contribute to diversity and inclusion by connecting individuals from different backgrounds and fostering a culture of support and understanding.

• Succession Planning - Organisations benefit by developing a pipeline of talented individuals who are groomed for leadership roles through mentorship programmes. Mentorship also helps to pass on institutional knowledge and expertise from experienced employees to newer generations, ensuring continuity within the organisation.

• Mutual Learning - While mentors share their knowledge, mentees can bring fresh perspectives and ideas, creating a dynamic exchange of knowledge and fostering a culture of continuous learning.

By connecting experienced individuals with individuals who are eager to learn, mentorship programmes can play a crucial role in professional and personal growth as well as in creating a supportive environment that enhances skills, builds relationships, and contributes to individual and organisational success.

The Culture of ‘Belonging’

DDS Dobson-Smith is the CEO and founder of a SoulTrained, a consultancy with the mission to help leaders and individuals to become more of who they really are. SoulTrained was formed three years ago and before that DDS had a twenty 20-year career in HR and L&D gained in a variety of organisations including M&S and Sony Music Entertainment as well as advertising agencies and civil engineering consultancies. Because of DDS’S background and qualifications in psychology and psychotherapy the idea of bringing that into the workplace really appealed. The SoulTrained ethos of ‘training’ at a soul level believes that when we shift things at the soul level we systemically address changes in behaviour attitude and approach. The idea behind SoulTrained is that they are there to help leaders and individuals to become more of who they really are.

DDS feels that our soul is our light, the very essence of who we are as an individual. When we are born our soul is very present. People talk about how you can see the soul of a child in their early years because it’s very close to the surface. Then when we grow up and experience life we learn to cover up our soul because its either too bright for other people to handle or because we want to protect it from people who are mean or cruel to us. Over time we build up armour that we put on and wear to protect ourselves but which also stops us from connecting from other people. This is particularly true at work where many people, particularly those who come from groups that have identities that come from marginalised or historically excluded groups, cover up aspects of who they are. When we accept ourselves as we are for who we are and accept others for who they are as they are, so much gets moved out of the way. DDS feels this is congruence, of being in touch with your inner self rather than authenticity.

All living things have a soul. The collection of souls that come together become the organisations soul because an organisation is more than a piece of paper, a website or bank account. As an individual we can experience inner conflict, the world of discrepancy theory. The ‘who we think we’ are versus the ‘who we want to be’ versus the ‘who we really are’. This inner conflict we experience as individuals can be experienced at a group or organisational level as well. It comes back to congruency or being in rapport with self, with others and with life itself.

DDS uses Attachment Theory as one of the lenses through which to talk about how to create more belonging at work. From Attachment Theory we learn how to create a template for all of our future relationships through the relationship we have with out primary caregivers from the moment we are born. Connection and nurture is actually a biological imperative and that when we don't experience attachment, nurture and care in our adult life, it can have the same impact as when we don't experience it in our childhood.

There are parallels between parenting styles and styles in which we are parented and how those play out in the workplace.  Someone who is being managed might have a tendency to unconsciously act out the way they might have behaved as a child. When we are managing someone we might a tendency to act out the way in which we were parented.  So many parallels exist between our childhood and adulthood that if we are not aware of the patterns we have learned we may go and replay them in our adult life.

If you are congruent you have the capacity to belong. Belonging is something that is an experience that is part of building an appropriate culture in the workplace. The concept of belonging is particularly topical at the moment. The Great Resignation or as DDS refers to it The Great Realisation has seen a large number of people start to ask themselves some big questions about their life and whether what they do workwise fires them up or brings them light.  If the answer is no, people have decided to make a career change. Some have said yes it is what I want to do but question whether they are doing it where they want to do it or whether it is bringing meaning, purpose and a sense of belonging. The experience of belonging is what many people are seeking, somewhere they can go and be themselves so they aren’t using up energy to cover up, dumb down or suppress aspects of their personality or themselves in order to fit in.  When they aren’t using that energy to create a persona to fit in, that energy is released and available for work.

In order to have that experience of belonging you have to have the behaviour of inclusion in an organisation. That doesn’t just mean how people interact with each other it means policies, decision-making processes and frameworks. In order to have inclusion you have to have diversity. Diversity is binary. An organisation is either diverse or not. The question is ‘do I see people who are like me or not like me’. If the answer to both is yes then its probable that you have diversity. To get belonging you need inclusion. To get inclusion you need diversity but diversity might not always lead to inclusion and inclusion might not always lead to belonging.

The two most important people metrics to consider are employee attrition and employee engagement. DDS sees a correlation between the two in that when one goes up the other goes down. You want attrition to go down, not necessarily to zero because some healthy turnover is good but organisations need to look at the industry average and do better than that. You want engagement to increasingly go up. Engagement is different to happiness. It’s not about making people happy, it’s about the things that help people to feel aligned and motivated to show up.

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information here. Our upcoming guest list is also available along with our previous blogs.

You can find out more at www.soultrained.com or DDS’s new book is You Can Be Yourself Here: Your Pocket Guide to Creating Inclusive Workplaces by Using the Psychology of Belonging (Lioncrest Publishing, Feb. 2, 2022).

Managing the gap

In 2022 we find ourselves in a unique position of having five different generations working together. Although this is great in terms of diversity, managing multiple generations in the workplace isn’t always as easy as it sounds. Each defined generation comes with different expectations and perspectives so a management strategy that harnesses the distinctive skill set of each generation is needed if the best results are to be achieved.  

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to managing multiple generations. With differing work expectations, styles, strengths and concerns, comes misunderstandings, tensions and conflict. But by being aware of each employee’s framework of experience and their point of reference as well as generational work habits, it’s possible to introduce management policies that foster an environment that generates business advantage.

While there are exceptions in every generation, if managed correctly a multigenerational team will combine past learning with new perspectives, not only bringing greater efficiency but also the benefits that the insights and initiatives different age groups bring.

Gender, sexuality and communication.

The latest episode in our Resilience Unravelled series has now been released, Resilience Unravelled – Gender, sexuality and communication.

In this episode, Dr. Russell Thackeray talks to Georgie Williams, a specialist in gender and sexuality whose work focuses on how gender and sexuality varies in different communities and cultures around the world and how the Wests influence on those communities has shaped those identities.

Georgie identifies specifically as genderqueer and as pansexual. Georgie’s recent papers have focused predominantly on marginality pertaining to queer and specifically non-cisgender identities, but has also written about aspects of sexuality, structural violence, borders and bodies as sites of resistance through interdisciplinary and intersectional lenses.

Gender and sexuality play an integral role in all of our lives. Our dynamics, our sexual and non-sexual relationships and the roles assigned to us socially are often based around our gender perceptions of one another. In understanding how gender and sexuality vary, we can understand miscommunications between communities and cultures based on a mistranslation or misalignment of norms and practices.  If we understand them, that exclusivity is a means to create productivity, symbiosis and communication within communities. Understanding sexuality is about communication, something that benefits all of us

Georgie feels that the younger generation, in particular Generation Z, engages and focuses with this message more than many of the older generation. By focusing on visibility and representation, community based social change and practice can happen which really matters as it gives voices to individuals who were not afforded that opportunity in the first place. She thinks that globalization and access to the internet virtual spaces and social media has given younger people the opportunity to congregate and find their community.

The younger generation has been raised in a time where conversation around gender and sexuality is more open than ever before.  People can discuss sensitive matters in confidence with others who have gone through it before. In time social change can be enacted and communities will become more visible in non-virtual spaces. Small communities and marginal groups have always existed and found ways to congregate but now this is more feasible and visible.

One of the benefits of engaging with diversity in the workplace is that it focuses a brand new lens on what an organisation is doing. This will help shed light on potential blind spots that existing team members may have missed because of their own standpoint or experience.

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information about Georgie here. Our previous podcast episodes and upcoming guest list are also available. Our full blog archive is also available.

You can find out more about Georgie at /slashqueer.com

Compassion in the workplace

The latest episode in our Resilience Unravelled series has now been released, Resilience Unravelled – Compassion in the workplace.

In this episode, Dr. Russell Thackeray talks to Nate Regier who is the CEO and founding owner of Next Element Consulting, a global leadership firm dedicated to bringing compassion into the workplace. Nate is a former practicing psychologist and expert in social-emotional intelligence, interpersonal communication, and leadership.

Nate is now based in Kansas but originally was from the mid west. His parents were famers but decided to become missionaries so in the early 70’s Nate was living in Africa.  He spent his early childhood Zaire which is now the Democratic Republic of Congo and went to high school in Botswana in the 1980s. Nate feels that by travelling around at such a young age he learned to adapt and became very used to different cultures which has given him a different perspective of what its like to live in America now. He also believes that Africa was where the seeds of compassion were sowed in him Nate struggles with the traditional stereotypes of compassion such as Gandhi and Mother Theresa. He feels compassion is more than empathy. The Latin meaning of compassion is to suffer with – to have active engagement not just empathy.

Nate feels that conflict is a natural product of diversity - because we are different there will be conflict. Conflict is the energy created from diversity and means we have choices and opportunities and enables us to thrive and innovate. The only question is how will we use the energy of conflict?  A lot of conflict energy is spent in drama. In the drama triangle there are three roles – persecutor, victim and rescuer. The three roles can be quite fluid, with people moving between them and when people play these roles they feed off each other which distracts energy from well laid plans.

Nate originally trained as a clinical psychologist but felt it did not really suit him. He preferred more dynamic things such as coaching, consultancy, training and writing so, with some partners, he set up Next Element in 2008. Their aim was to take what they had learned in the social sciences field and apply it to the corporate world through leadership and development training and coaching programmes.

Many consultants in this field tend to play rescuer role – they know what’s wrong and have the solutions but if it doesn’t work its not their fault – it failed because you didn't do what they advised.  They actually set you up for failure and dependence. Nate feels that the goal is capability, self-confidence and independence but that all coaching relationship have a natural life and the coach and coachee need to know either can walk away from the relationship. Nate feels many consultants work to become needed rather than effective which is why he has developed certification programmes to impart knowledge which allows the company to carry on without him.

Nate views leadership as the practice of managing diversity towards shared goals.  Diversity is necessary as it provides the perspective we need so leaders need to cultivate a skill set to manage diversity whilst working towards shared goals. Two of the most essential competences needed to achieve this are communication and conflict management skills. Not everyone can clearly see a path so leaders need to translate the plan so everyone can understand – leaders need to have vision and strategy but also the human capital to go forward.

Nate’s latest book is called Seeing People Through and is about personality differences and inclusion through the Process Communication Model, a behavioural communication model that teaches people how to assess, connect, motivate, and resolve conflict by understanding the personality types that make up a person’s whole self.

You can listen to the podcast in full and find out further information about Nate here. Our previous podcast episodes and upcoming guest list are also available.

You can find out more about Nate here.