My experience with this person is fairly recent. He was doing some strategy work with my company and as part of that I asked him to do some one-to-one work with me, in a mentoring/coaching capacity.
He has experience of running a large organisation, and can mentor me through some of the things I am facing.
We started off meeting up once a fortnight for three sessions, but we’ve eased off now to monthly meetings. We meet for a couple of hours, and deal with whatever I want from the session. It can range from things to do with my job running the company to personal issues that I need to overcome as I step into my new role as managing director.
My mentor is very insightful and extremely supportive – he champions me, which is really important to me. I knew beforehand what I wanted and needed from this mentoring relationship because of the strategy work that we were already doing, looking at the vision of the business.
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We came up with a four-year strategy and key initiatives, so I guess out of that the change of roles became apparent – and he showed me what I needed to do differently.
I have trained both mentors and mentees, and I have a coach, with whom I am doing some quite specific work. I would like to think that my mentor and I will have some form of long-term relationship, although I’m not sure if the mentoring itself will continue.
