Mentoring In The Hybrid & Remote Era
I am a huge advocate of mentoring and coaching. I don’t say this as a coach, I say this as something who learnt a lot from mentors, especially unofficial mentoring, importantly reverse mentoring and silent mentors.
(Remember a coach is someone who has hard goals with deadlines to improve a core set of skills. A mentor is someone who helps to guide you over a longer period often without setting goals but to help you navigate difficult situations and build towards the future. You can have multiple mentors and likely have one coach who will help specialist skills develop and then change, coaches and mentors can overlap)
Having spoken to several businesses over the last year and the majority are worried about their move to hybrid and remote and how it will impact their staff.
Something most overlooked is the coaching element of in-person work and the indirect mentoring many get from spending time face-to-face, in meetings and bumping into each other in the office, going for lunch or grabbing a coffee together.
These are situations that can be re-engineered but have to be engineered as many do not seek out their own internal development and will let these moments not happen because of a screen or poor nudging from leadership.
How to think about improving mentorship moments:
Organise time slots for mentorship (leadership teams shouldn’t have to do this but if they don’t it won’t be something that naturally occurs throughout the org)
Set up fika - A Swedish traditional for friends or colleagues to grab a pastry and a coffee together
Create moments to share learnings and a mentor manual that people can access and learn from
Create reserve mentorship - match younger team members with more senior members (especially good for those on the leadership team) to understand what the teams feels, see's and the latest changes in their area of expertise
Create internal mentorship programmes and see if you can invest time into sourcing and matching in external mentors, external mentors are often taken more seriously as they do not have a status or stake in the internal game being played.
All of these will help you improve mentors, amentorship and endorse a mentor programme that likely needs the most senior support in pushing forward.
>> If you are worried about your wider subculture (what I suggest is your department’s culture), I wrote about it in my leadership newsletter leaders letter last year.
Want to go deeper into different types of mentors?
Internal mentors are usually paired or seeked out, less experienced staff are matched with more experienced members to help navigate the business and have a support network
External mentors are usually seeked out by the employee or their manager - they can be in a related field or have a lot of similar experiences to help the mentee forward
Silent mentors are those you learn from, their emails, and the way they handle themselves in meetings, but also are those who have direct impact on you, likely through the content they put out, the podcasts they host or appear on etc.
Reverse mentorship is critical for great managers and generalists and those who are serious about their career and improving their career internally.
And if you are not taken by what I have said here’s the all in podcast discussing mentorship from 11:18 ↓
