Course information

Learn to build success in your team and your business by mentoring your people. Mentoring is a one-to-one relationship in which you, as a leader, actively help an employee reflect on strengths, solve problems and build career resilience.

Aims

In this one-day course, you’ll learn how to use positive psychology techniques to mentor your people and build a better team.

Outcomes

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

• describe the difference between coaching, mentoring and counselling
• choose when and how to mentor in professional contexts
• build intrinsic motivation, using positive goal setting tools
• help staff learn from experience, by fostering growth mindsets
• pinpoint and develop a mentee’s signature strengths
• adapt and apply the GROW coaching cycle to a mentoring conversation
• deliver developmental feedback which promotes success
• apply simple career guidance and positive goal setting tools to the mentoring context.

Content

What is mentoring?

Mentoring is a one-to-one relationship in which you, as mentor, actively help a team member reflect on their strengths, solve problems and build a successful career. Learn the difference between coaching, mentoring and counselling. Identify suitable candidates for mentoring. Plan your mentoring activities.

Setting up for success

Dynamic mentoring relationships are characterised by high levels of rapport - whilst remaining professional. Learn to establish boundaries and conversational norms which keep mentoring conversations on track. Avoid common mentoring pitfalls. Create a relaxed environment that supports reflective learning and growth.

Building motivation with Self-Determination Theory

Every mentor dreams of having a motivated, high-performing mentee. To achieve this, you need to tap into an individual’s internal motivators. Learn how Self-determination theory can help you do this. Understand the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Apply positive psychology tools for fostering intrinsic motivation in the workplace.

Creating growth mindsets

Carol Dweck’s research into ‘mindsets’ sheds light on what’s involved in learning from experience and thinking flexibly. Dweck claims there is a huge difference between two styles of mindset: the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. Discover how to help your staff learn from mistakes, reflect on their abilities and think flexibly by adopting growth mindsets.

Spotting and building strengths

Successful mentoring builds on strengths, rather than focusing on weaknesses. Find out what strengths are from a positive psychology perspective. Learn to use strengths-spotting techniques to identify an individual’s utilised, under-utilised and over-utilised strengths. Structure strengths-based conversations to build motivation and engagement.

Coaching for success

To mentor successfully, you need to adopt a coaching approach. Coaching involves helping people to find their own ways to change. Learn how to combine a simple four-step process with solution-focused questions, so you can help a mentee set goals, solve problems and make robust decisions.

Giving developmental feedback

Feedback is a building block for change and development. This makes it an important tool for mentors. Hear how to analyse a staff member's strengths and challenge areas and use a developmental feedback process to highlight these during mentoring conversations.

Mentoring for career development

Highly motivated people have vision, purpose and goals. Use simple career guidance tools and positive goal-setting techniques to develop these attributes in your team.

Intended audience

Experienced managers and leaders, Human Resources practitioners.

Course level

Advanced/experienced leader

Delivery modes

• Face-to-face, presenter-taught workshop
• Online workshop via the platform Zoom

Materials

A course workbook, plus templates for core processes covered in this workshop is distributed electronically using Dropbox.