Organizations invest heavily in the training and development of their people. Mentoring is a proven way to promote employee growth and development, accelerate learning, fast-track leadership, improve retention, elevate morale, strengthen recruitment and promote diversity. Mentors need to understand the key components of mentoring, and how to avoid the pitfalls and stumbling blocks that tend to derail mentoring relationships. New and experienced mentors can benefit from enhancing their personal mentoring skills and applying mentoring best practices taught in this one-day workshop.
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Three-day program that prepares participants to facilitate Mentoring Strategies for Success. View Description (PDF)

Good mentoring depends on having a collaborative, reciprocal learning relationship with your mentor. Whether you are just starting your career, seeking personal or professional development, or transitioning to new responsibilities, it is important to understand what it takes to be an effective mentoring partner and how to successfully engage in the relationship. To reap the full benefit of mentoring, mentees need to know how to seek, select and recruit the right mentor for them. This workshop provides the guidelines for that process and teaches mentees how to drive the relationship, clarify what they need from their mentor, and to effectively utilize a variety of tools and skills to make the most of their partnership. View Description (PDF)

Three-day program that prepares participants to facilitate Making Mentoring Work for You.
Mentee Facilitator Certification Program Description (PDF)

Our 3-day certification process will prepare you to facilitate Making Mentoring Work for You, a one-day mentee training program.

The mentoring cycle includes four predictable phases critical to mentoring success. Each phase presents its own potential obstacles and challenges. This eight-hour advanced course is designed for experienced mentors. It offers proactive strategies and approaches to strengthen and enhance the mentee’s learning and raise the level of satisfaction of both mentoring partners. Mentors examine their current mentoring relationships and assess their personal mentoring skills. Using models of current best practices, mentors are able to target critical areas for improvement (such as listening, feedback and conflict management) to build skills that enhance the mentee’s learning. View Description (PDF)

Educators are well familiar with the need for mentoring. In many states mentoring is mandated. Often it is assumed that educators know instinctively how to mentor because mentoring is so tied to education and learning.

This 4-hour workshop, specifically designed for educators, blends educational theory and mentoring practice with the needs of educators for professional development. Topics covered include, mentoring concepts and core practices, the four phases of mentoring and education specific case studies.

Facilitating group mentoring is an art that takes practice and training. This three- hour session addresses both by blending facilitation practice with group mentor training. As participants are guided through each of the four phases of mentoring they have an immediate opportunity to apply and practice what they learning and receive feedback.

This two-day intensive focuses specifically on enhancing mentor performance and outcomes. Mentors reflect on their own experiences, examine personal biases and explore assumptions that can upend their mentoring relationship. Inventories and skills assessments help participants increase awareness of their role and responsibility as a mentor and evaluate their mentoring strengths and personal challenges. Participants have an opportunity to improve mentoring skills and approaches by learning about best practice models, engaging in experiential activities and role-plays, and receiving feedback from their peers. Participants leave with an action plan that will help them grow and develop as mentors.

Mentoring requires a culture to support its implementation and fully integrate it into the organization. It must be embedded into an organization’s culture in order to achieve long-term sustainability. This consultation/workshop is designed for any groups of individuals who are tasked with designing, developing and implementing mentoring programs, at departmental, organizational or community of practice (multiple organizations) level.

Participants are guided step-by-step in creating a shared vision of what mentoring might look like in their organizations, assessing their organizational readiness, designing appropriate mentoring opportunities and putting structures and processes in place to support all the mentoring that goes on in an organization. Key features of this workshop include: a culture audit, infrastructure analysis, establishing goals and measurable outcomes, and building the framework for alignment, accountability, and communication, creating demand, value and visibility, training, safety nets. Participants leave the workshop with the draft of a mentoring implementation plan.

This is a six-hour workshop for organizational leaders who will be implementing or supporting a mentoring program. The workshop provides practical tools, techniques and templates for developing, launching, supporting and evaluating an EMP. View Description (PDF)

Every profession has its own standards and practices. It is essential that the practice of mentoring be an integral part of larger organizational goals to ensure that mentoring efforts contribute to successful business outcomes. This three-hour program is offered in two formats: a contextualized program that is customized to the organization’s goals and business needs, or a generic platform that allows participants to integrate the model with their own context. The outcome is a clear understanding of the principles and practices that promote effective mentoring and a method for applying them to the mentor’s work.

This unique program is designed to prepare mentees to transition from their role as a mentee to mentor. The length of the program varies from two-hours to six, depending on the experience level of the group. Participants are guided in reflecting on and learning from their own past mentoring experiences. They familiarize themselves with the role of the mentor and explore its implications. Participants assess their own motivations, attributes, and readiness for the role and complete several assessments to examine their own assumptions about mentoring and determine how those assumptions impact the relationship and results. Specific skill development activities focus on listening, communication, accountability and feedback to raise mentoring competency.

This comprehensive two-day seminar is designed for organizational mentoring champions and those responsible for the integration, support and sustainability of a mentoring program. This interactive workshop includes:

• The best practices and principles of mentoring and the building blocks and pragmatics of how to build an effective mentoring program.
• Practical tips, tools and techniques to help leaders move to the next step in implementing a mentoring program, or dealing with glitches and stumbling blocks of an existing program.
• Best practices that you can be customized to your organization.
• The opportunity for teams to learn the essentials of mentoring, from understanding key concepts and the mentoring cycle, to developing and honing specific mentoring skills and building a sustainable and growing mentoring program.
• A copy of “The Mentor’s Guide: Facilitating Effective Learning Relationships” (Jossey-Bass, 2000).
• Outcomes that help mentors and mentees become more fully engaged in the mentoring process, foster a mentoring culture throughout your organization, and a take away draft mentoring program roadmap.
• Value to your organization and employees by offering a unique opportunity to meet a variety of organizational needs and challenges simultaneously: i.e., expand employee knowledge; facilitate personal, professional and career development; improve retention; build morale; increase organizational commitment; and accelerate leadership development and succession planning.

The assumptions that mentors make can present significant obstacles to effective mentoring. When mentoring partners operate under different assumptions it creates a lack of shared understanding. Without shared understanding, trust erodes, communication becomes in authentic and both the relationship and the learning are compromised. Therefore, it is essential that mentors check regularly to make sure that the assumptions they hold about mentoring, their mentoring partners and their mentoring relationships are valid and accurate.

Participants examine the kinds of assumptions that people make in day to day mentoring communication, learn how to check out their own assumptions for validity, and practice techniques for recognizing and overcoming obstacles.

Mentoring excellence requires that mentors master SMART goal setting and feedback skills. Both processes are critical to enhancing learning and building authentic and productive mentoring relationships. Since learning is the quintessential purpose of the relationship, all that follows depends on clearly defining SMART learning goals. If goals are left too broad, chances are neither the mentor nor the mentee will be satisfied with the learning process, the learning outcome or the mentoring relationship. The mentoring relationship is often the only place where mentees can count on getting honest constructive feedback. Effective feedback can help close performance gaps and assist the mentee in targeting appropriate areas for growth and development. Participants assess examples of mentee goals against SMART criteria, set SMART goals for their own professional growth, practice giving feedback, and getting feedback on their feedback!

This self-directed peer mentoring process enables the mentee to get the benefits of mentoring from a number of people in a short period of time. This process can be used with groups as small as 6-8 people, or be conducted in larger forums by multiple creating small group structures. The duration of the session varies from 1½ -2 ½ hours, depending on the group size.

This three-hour session is designed for individuals and organizations that want to establish a sustainable peer mentoring process. Participants learn the Adobe Mentoring Protocol and how to make it an effective process. Topics covered during the session include: establishing and holding people accountable for the process, establishing ground rules, variations on the format, facilitator roles and responsibilities, strategies for starting and closing the process.

In this 2 1/2 hour interactive workshop participants test their "generational IQ." They explore the validity of their personal assumptions about generational differences. Participants examine the challenges Baby Boomers and GenXers face in mentoring Millennials and the challenges Millennials face in being mentored by them. Using case studies scenarios, participants practice strategies that will assist them in bridging the generational divide in their mentoring relationships.

Coming to Closure offers one of the most profound learning experiences in a mentoring relationship. If closure is to be a mutually satisfying and meaningful learning experience, mentoring partners must prepare and plan for it. This two-hour workshop leads participants, step by step, through the six components of a successful closure experience. Topics covered include: planning for closure, conducting the closure conversation, integrating learning, celebrating success, redefining the relationship, and moving on.