Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Ricky. Welcome to MentorClick's Mentoring Soundbites, where we answer some of the most common and important questions professionals just like you ask about starting, managing, and growing your mentoring programs. In this video, you'll hear soundbites from mentoring program champions at several organizations on how they use mentoring as part of their leadership development strategy. We hope you find this video helpful. Be sure to like and subscribe for more mentoring best practices like these.

Speaker 2: The programs are really short enough. Our programs are 10 month in series in duration. So they're short enough to where you can learn from your mentor. And then they're long enough, right, or that's long enough for you to learn from your mentor, but then short enough to have multiple mentors. And as you continue to move through an organization, and you're developing these mentors, many of them sit at the decision making table. And that's really the difference between a sponsor and a mentor is that a mentor is someone who is at the decision making table and can really help navigate your career, whether it's for a promotional opportunity, a project assignment, or a growth assignment of any kind. So you're building these relationships, and then mentors extend their networks to others, and to you as a mentee, and then you're able to have other people in the organization who can vouch for you and talk about how you would be a great fit, or the right person for a particular role. So it's through the concept of the program being short enough to develop multiple mentors who can then turn into sponsors for you. And I believe that there is a need still for some formal sponsor programs, although I haven't gone out into that arena yet. But I do feel like this is a great way for it to happen organically in organizations.

Speaker 3: So how do you gain the experience if you haven't gotten the role yet? So I think mentoring, at least the structure as we have it in Bacardi, for me, it helps me get that hands-on experience, because I get to manage nine volunteers. I get to recruit them. I have to provide them with a vision, not just short term, but long term, so they can buy into why it is that I'm spending all this time volunteering my time, my free time, in this program. So for me, it's critical, because that's part of leading a team. You have to create all these structures so that they feel they're working towards an

Speaker 4: end goal. Many years ago, I was introduced to a model of leadership that's built around courage, and it has three very simple components. They're simple, but when you begin to dissect them, they're quite powerful. And this model comes from Bill Treasurer, and he's a piece of coach and a consultant that I was aware of many years before I came to CBRE. And his model says there are three kinds of courage. There's try courage, which is the ability to attempt to take action, to move forward. There's trust courage, which has to do with relationship building and trusting others to do their part. And then there's tell courage, which is the courage of voice, finding your voice, being able to articulate your thoughts and opinions and provide feedback. Created a perfect structure for empower courage and this whole idea of courageous leadership. And so that's what they talk about in their sessions. In order to support the group mentoring in the very best way I could think of, I put together a mentoring guide for each month. In the first month, the mentoring guide focuses on the general concept of courageous self-leadership. And as an overview of those three types of courage I mentioned, try, trust, and tell. So that's the first month. And the mentor is provided with questions and a couple of activities to help create a connection, to help create a vulnerable, safe environment for the mentees to begin building those relationships.

Speaker 5: So with us, we chose this particular audience for the leadership exchange because we wanted to support the transition for our new leaders in that frontline roles, that first and second level positions. And anybody who's going through transition, whether it be joining the new company, taking on a new role, learning a new skill set, you're in a vulnerable position and you're just particularly vulnerable. And having someone that you can turn to, to ask any questions about, get some guidance, maybe ask them, what am I not seeing is just so beneficial. So that's the reason why we chose that particular audience. In addition, we have had high turnover in those roles and these are key positions and they're under pressures to build the business, grow their teams, develop their teams. It's a lot of pressure. It's a very fast paced environment.

Speaker 1: Does your leadership development plan include a mentoring component? Let us know in the comments below. While there are courses you can offer your high potentials to learn more about leadership development, those are best supplemented with peer-to-peer learning. Mentoring programs allow you to more authentically connect new and emerging leaders into personal relationships with existing leaders to get real engagement and solve problems in real-time. For even more mentoring tips, check out the links below the video or visit us at MentorClick.com. And don't forget to like and subscribe to get updated on mentoring best practices like these.