Bringing People Together, Reshaping The Future – The Role of Mentoring in Developing Thriving Learning Organisations

MENTORING - SPARK THE LIGHT IN LEARNING ORGANISATIONS, FROM THE BOARDROOM TO THE ONBOARDING ROOM?

In our previous articles How Can Organisations Thrive in the Incredibly Challenging Post-Pandemic Global Landscape? The Answer: Become a Learning Organisation and Learn or Die: Do Organisations Really Have a Different Option in Today’s High-Stakes Environment? we discussed at length why learning organisations are the type of companies most likely to survive the high tides we are facing on the global market in the years to come. Today the time has come to talk about the fastest and the most effective method you have at your disposal to turn your company into a learning organisation: Mentoring.????

THE GIFT AND CURSE OF COMPLEX STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT

If we know that learning organisations are the way into the future, how come we don’t see more companies moving in this direction already? ?

One of the answers can be complex stakeholder management. Over the last decade, the importance of including all partners in a complex business ecosystem has become overwhelming for many organisations and their managers.

“As organisations are facing complex global challenges, they need to identify and engage with multiple stakeholders to design new solutions collaboratively,” said Karine Mangion-Thornley , senior Lecturer in Organisation Studies at the University of the West of England, who is a guest panelist at the upcoming EMCC Global Mentoring Conference BRINGING PEOPLE TOGETHER – RESHAPING THE FUTURE. The conference takes place this Friday, October 28th, 2022, virtually and brings together people and organisation development experts from all over the world to explore the role of mentoring in our thriving in the future.

Mangion-Thornley continued: “These stakeholders include primarily organisations’ workforce and clients/customers/target audience. External stakeholders include local and international suppliers, governments, local communities and so on. As coaches and mentors, we can support leaders’ strategic thinking by asking them: “What can we do as an organisation to support our employees so they can deliver the services/goods needed now? What can we do differently? What are our under-used assets and resources? Additional questions may include: “How to capitalise the learning gained from internal and external stakeholders? How may cross-fertilisation operate? How to design new ways of working effectively and sustainably?” she emphasised.

SPARK THE LIGHT OF LEARNING THROUGH HIGHLY CALIBRATED INDIVIDUAL EDUCATION ?

“For me, mentoring is a very safe space - I would even call it a sacred space - for learning. A space for experience sharing and for very specific, unique, precise learning that is tailored to individual needs,” said Lenka Mrazova , an executive mentor and coach, Senior Practitioner with EMCC, and founder of LMentio Czech Republic . “The caveat is that such unique learning tailored to individual requires time, energy, and money. Mentors have deep work / business experience that could never be fully captured in a manual. When they transfer their knowledge and enable mentees’ learning process their knowledge and working experience stay within the company. If you create various channels where people can truly openly communicate their learning needs, the net of mentoring pairs can become sufficiently dense to spark the light of learning into each meeting room, from the board room to onboarding newcomers,” Mrázová noted.

“Mentoring provides an excellent platform for seasoned members of the organisation to share basic organisation assumptions with new members. This allows new members to comprehend and question the underlying assumptions to the values and beliefs of the organisation: allowing them to understand why the organisation makes certain decision in a certain unique way.?This channel for informal questioning is highly critical as it will open up a common ground for the mentor and the mentee to share openly about their assumptions when they are working together toward a challenge - a fundamental experience to forming a new culture”,?said Ivan Yong , an organisational psychologist, angel investor, entrepreneur and author and founder of the Corporate Disruptors Forum .?

“Mentoring creates a learning culture inside the organisation. It provides a better way to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of learning by keeping track of the KPI - key performance index, KBI - key behavior index - and ROI - return on investment, which is hard for other disciplines such as coaching, teaching, consulting to achieve. Mentoring is especially effective for tacit knowledge management when adopting internal mentoring,” said Fisher Yu , the managing director of MentoringCo China and another distinguished EMCC panel discussion guest.

MENTOR YOUR WAY INTO THE FUTURE – AS AN INDIVIDUAL AND ORGANISATION

To conclude, mentoring is a powerful approach to share knowledge, experience, and establish long-term trustworthy relationships. “However complex, the problems that organisations face can be explored through the lens of experience and existing knowledge. We need to start somewhere,” said Karine Mangion-Thornley.

“Mentors have a critical role to play in developing learning organisations. The role of mentors is to share their social capital, experience, and understanding of underlying mechanisms of collaboration across multiple stakeholders. By doing so, they help to bridge old and new approaches, and avoid repeating the same mistakes. Their role is also to support the development of employees, at a cognitive, behavioral, and emotional levels. Particularly, they have an important role as connectors in the new hybrid and digital world of work, where they facilitate connection-focused conversations to ensure that employees are engaged and feel supported,” she concluded.

“Indeed. I have been working with remote organisations since 2017 and hybrid organisations since 2020 and I cannot emphasise enough how vital mentoring is in distributed teams and company cultures. Having a solid buddy system, having a mentor from the very first day in the organisation will increase the chance of retention and thus diminish recruitment costs, will accelerate productivity, will boost inclusion and belonging, and will nurture the pipeline of talent for future leadership. If this is not thriving, I don’t know what is,” said Cristina Violeta Muntean , EMCC Senior Practitioner, founder of VORNICA? , a company on a mission to triple the number of women CEOs in Europe by 2030, and moderator of the EMCC panel discussion.

“We cannot underestimate the challenges ahead of us as companies and countries. We have a war in Europe and more conflict around the world; we have rising social unrest; we have an increasing digital gap that excludes almost half of the population from benefiting from the privileges brought to us by technology. We have to start looking beyond immediate profit and more into our long-term purpose so we can thrive. In distributed teams and organisations Place has been replaced with Purpose; if people don’t understand why they are supposed to do their work, they will move fast to the next stellar global employer. A well-trained, humble mentor and a thorough mentoring program will help you to achieve that – to thrive in any form and shape, from fully remote to hybrid and to fully in-person organisations,” Muntean said.

How can your company start developing a cohesive mentoring program and thus set the ground for becoming a real, thriving learning organisation? Join us for our high-stake panel discussion on learning organisations during the upcoming EMCC Global Mentoring Conference on 28th October 2022 , for a day full of inspiration, insights, and mutual support.

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