Beliefs for Creating a Culture of Leadership

Mentoring is a key ingredient in building organizations that thrive. It’s a cost-effective way to build capacity, strengthen relationships, and increase engagement and job satisfaction.

Moving Beyond Traditional Mentor-Mentee Relationships to Mentoring Circles

Traditional mentoring in organizations pairs a more senior employee with a junior counterpart.- often helping them onboard into a new job or contributing to their career path within the organization It is a one-way relationship between 2 people with the mentor guiding the mentee. The learning and teaching are limited to these 2 people without benefit to others in the organization.

Mentoring Circles, on the other hand, bring a group of people together for collective mentoring. With a possible mix of levels of seniority, roles within the organization and departments, collective learning happens that impacts the entire organization. Regular mentoring circles focused on the skills, competencies, and experiences needed to achieve the organization’s goals can result in continual development of your organizational capacity, strengthening the organization and all of its employees.

Once instituted as a regular practice in your team and organization, benefits from mentoring circles include increasing knowledge transfer between people, building collaboration and cooperation, increasing individual and collective wisdom, and improving the functioning of the team and organization through improved relationship capacity. These attributes for teams and organizations are considered essential for optimal performance. Including mentoring circles as part of your team and organizational development is a simple yet powerful way to accomplish these attributes.