Types of Mentoring

Mentoring programmes are often put in place for the entire organisation with a general focus on:

• Enabling mutual learning
• Increasing confidence
• Encouraging reflective practice

However, mentoring programmes can also be set up with an aim to support very specific groups such as:
 

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• Graduates
  A key lookout for many graduates when looking to join an organisation is that there is a mentoring programme to support their induction. Graduate mentoring programmes support new recruits in understanding and navigating the informal organisation, speeding their acclimatisation and increasing retention levels.
• Talent Pools
  Talented employees need customised, just-in-time learning opportunities and mentoring is one of the most effective ways of providing these.
• Diversity Groups
  Diversity mentoring is a process of open dialogue that aims to achieve both individual and organisational change, through shared understanding and suspending judgement. Mentoring helps people from minorities build track record, gain access to promotion opportunities and establish networks within the organisation. It also has the benefit that it usually results in the education of senior managers, who become mentors, in a wide range of issues relating to diversity.
• Women Returning to Work
  Women returning to work after maternity leave face tough and different challenges. Having the support of a mentor improves the retention rate of these valuable employees and helps them settle back in more quickly and more confidently.
• Group Mentoring
  A common problem with mentoring programmes is the shortage of suitable mentors. The higher up the organisation, the fewer people there are available to fulfil the role – and some of these may be neither willing nor able to do so. Group mentoring is one solution – the focus is to ensure the set up supports all participants with clarity around exactly how this process will work.
• CSR Agenda
  From an employment perspective, community mentoring is a very effective way to develop and widen the scope of mentoring skills. The more environments in which you practise mentoring, the more insightful and effective you are likely to be. Community mentoring is often much more stretching than in-company mentoring in terms of needing to accept and understand very different perspectives and values.
• Reverse Mentoring
  Sometimes called upward mentoring, this changes the typical hierarchy of the mentoring relationship. The mentor is more senior in the organisation than the mentee. It is proving very powerful in terms of culture change, particularly in the context of equal opportunities/ diversity; and in linking executives to the expertise and experience of younger specialist employees – for example, in IT.