Mentoring Supervision
In the course of developing mentoring programmes, we have been faced with the challenges of how to support and educate mentors at varying stages of development in order to facilitate their ethical practice and ongoing progression as a mentor. This may be frequently complicated by the mentors being part of a wider organisational programme, where access to the mentors, resources (people and funding) and motivation to spend more time on the programme, can all be very limited.
Mentors tend to be volunteers who are mentoring for a very small part of their working time and tend to have busy and stressful day jobs. In contrast to professional full time coaches, selling the benefits of mentor supervision to part time voluntary mentors can be a harder sell.
NWDA Case Study
The NWDA Business mentoring programme commenced in September 2009 and is seeking to support 3,000 SME leaders and managers in the North West of England over a three-year period. The aim of the programme is to establish an exemplary one–to–one mentoring programme demonstrating accredited quality standards. The focus of the mentoring is on small businesses with the potential to grow, which is a core objective of increasing the availability and standard of mentoring provision in the region and robust evaluation.
The delivery model has four key elements to it to ensure these deliverables:
- a quality framework based on the ISMPE standards (International Standards for Mentoring Programmes in Employment),
- a central co-ordination team,
- delivery through a trained and quality controlled provider network and,
- ongoing monitoring and evaluation.
Given the number of people involved in the scheme, a train-the-trainers approach to mentor development was adopted, with a number of professional mentoring organisations (the providers) being contracted to actually deliver the mentor development to the mentors.
The on-going support and supervision for the programme has been provided at two levels: for the provider organisations and the mentors themselves:
Mentoring Supervision for Providers
Provider Networking Events are run by the Central Team (supported by Coach Mentoring Ltd) three times a year to disseminate knowledge and share best practice. These sessions are an opportunity for the organisations to be versed in further mentoring themes and theory, which they can then deliver at their own Mentor Focus Groups. New research and cutting edge best practice is shared at these sessions. It is also an opportunity to share evaluation results from the programme and discuss aspects of interest to the providers to enable them to use this formative evaluation wisely.
In our heuristic, this provider supervision is providing a development function to the professional mentors. In the programme set up, the providers attended a workshop where they were given details about the expectations of them on the programme as well as some approaches and models to practice with in the session. Hence, these workshops provided both the Quality Assurance & Training Functions of supervision for these providers.
Mentoring Supervision for Mentors
In turn, the providers run Mentor Focus Groups for the mentors. Such meetings provide an opportunity for mentors to discuss concerns, to gain further knowledge or skills training and to network generally with other mentors on the programme. Again, mirroring the overall logic of the programme, a number of Exemplar Focus Groups are being run by Lis Merrick for the Central Team which serve a Quality Assurance, Development and Training Function for the mentors in terms of their supervisory needs. The process involves mentors working in pairs or small groups and discussing issues around their mentoring process and practice in order to receive:
- Mentoring on their own practice
- The time to explore techniques and help with their problems
- An opportunity to reflect on their own practice
- Help and support if they feel out of their depth
- Support with ethical issues.
In addition to these focus groups, each mentor is invited to attend up to three supervision sessions per annum, lasting between 2 – 3 hours, provided by the Provider organisations. These tend to be group supervisions.