 Hello and welcome to today's webcast, Emerging Themes in Mentoring, A Global Perspective. I'd like to thank everyone for joining today and for those of you who have in the past, you will notice that this is the second webcast we're doing on mentoring. Today is all about conducting mentoring programs but talking about it in a global perspective. So we'll be looking at some trends and we have an amazing panel to discuss a few different things that are emerging on the scene as well. So without any further ado, I would like to welcome Dr Professor, sorry, David Glatterbach and also Melissa Richardson from Art of Mentoring. How are you both today? Well, thanks Sarah. Pretty good. Excellent. Thank you so much for joining us. What we're going to do is just take a look at what we're going to cover and as you can see the agenda on the screen. But Melissa, first of all, let's start with your recent research which covers the first topic. Sure. So the first topic we're talking about really is why companies and membership organisations in particular are introducing mentoring. Why now and how they're currently designing and implementing mentoring programs. There wasn't a lot of research done particularly outside the corporate space but if you look at what was already published in the literature, we know that for companies that are obviously employers, there's a lot of benefit in actually putting up a good mentoring program to become an employer of choice. So it actually builds brand reputation. It helps people engage in the business or the organisation. It actually helps a lot with retention and funnily enough return to work. I think some of your data, David looks at people who've left and then if they have a mentor, they're much more likely to return and also just building capacity. So we know from the published literature that if people are in a program, they're actually much more likely to have a salary increase. They're much more likely to maintain connection and loyalty to an organisation. What we didn't know was what are some of the kind of micro-reasons that maybe organisations were embarking on mentoring. And we surveyed just over a hundred organisations. We found quite a lot of them were running mentoring programs. So we asked them what was the purpose for them to be running their programs and these were the sorts of things people were saying. So particularly for associations, they were running programs to help students make career choices. In corporates, it was often about helping graduates transition into a chosen profession, assisting new recruits to assimilate into a company, creating those intergenerational links and transferring knowledge from the baby boomers because we know many of us in that baby boomer age group will retire sometime in the next 20 years or so. So how are we going to hand that knowledge over? Another important role for mentoring, and I'll talk a little more about that later, is actually providing support and reducing the isolation that comes, particularly for people who are working in remote locations, which can be an issue in Australia because it's such a big country. I'm just using mentoring to engage and connect people. Another common use of mentoring is helping women and people from ethnic minorities to advance their careers. That's why I've been involved in a lot of programs for women, as has David. Members in an organisation like associations really want an avenue to give back. They're actually often champing at the bit. We know that mentoring actually helps develop leadership skills within an industry or a profession and build leadership capacity in a company. So all of these things that I'm putting up, I won't go through the rest, were the kinds of things that people were saying, this is why they're running mentoring. So within this, obviously there's some great reasons here, and I'm pretty sure we can all relate to them. When it does come to mentoring, no, because I am part of mentoring in my work at the moment and in the past, I've been part of these programs. So the research, were these people that had been part of formal mentoring programs, or were they perhaps more unstructured? Was a bit of both. That was another interesting finding in the research actually, because some people were running what we would call a more formal or unstructured program, and in that case, they had a beginning, a middle and an end of the program. They had a lot of touch points where the program administrators could check in with the participants. And then there were other organizations that had perhaps just a list of mentors on a website where people could go and self-select. There were some differences. We found that the people who had more of the formal and the structure tended to be a bit happy with the results they were getting from their program, which kind of supports what we believed. Wasn't that David? Absolutely, yeah. Thought that, but it's now nice to have some data. So why is that? Why is that, do you think, besides the obvious reasons? I think there's a very clear reason for that is that people, there is a clear correlation from the research between the sense of purpose for the relationship. Why is this supported? Is it wanted? Is there somebody who's actually behind all this or there's some real reason for doing this from the organization and the quality of the conversations that people have and the sense that if it's supported, you can be much more open in the conversations. So I think that's one of the reasons you just get a better quality relationship. Otherwise it could just be having a chat, right? Exactly, exactly. Nothing really tied to it. Yeah, and sometimes those little check-ins from a program manager just a reminder, you know, you're, you know, with three months in, maybe it's time to talk about these sorts of things with your mentor. People just find that really useful. OK, great. So moving on now, we're just going to launch a poll because we do want to get your opinion. So when it does come to mentoring, we would like you to just use your computers to actually select the best one that represents you. So we would like you to please select the mentor in program types that you offer within your organization. So we're just going to launch that poll now and then we'll actually see the results coming through. So as you're actually completing those, I just want to turn to our panel. So what do we usually see? So when you do go into organizations, what's probably the most common one that you see people are running? In corporates, it's definitely high potential talent programs. They're emerging leaders and stuff like that. Yeah, globally, it's very, very, it's very diverse. Yep. And interestingly, we've seen a movement over the last 20 years away from a very high dominance of graduate programs into a much wider range of different kinds of programs. And they tend to be focused on what the business needs are at the moment. And it could be there's a particular group like First Line Managers, for example, or there's a need for a culture change in an organization. So all of those things might inform it. But certainly the biggest one globally seems to be, or there's two themes globally. One is about entrepreneurs and particularly small businesses, and the other is diversity. So actually really leveraging and using the range of talents from all sorts of different people in the organization. Yeah. And do you find it does vary when it comes to industry? Yes, but we don't have any real statistics to demonstrate that. Well, hopefully this poll will give us some more statistics. So we actually have some results and we'll actually share them with you. But top coming in at 20% young members' mental programs. Just beneath that, we have on a tie 16.5%. We have student mental programs and then also diversity mental programs, which really is in line with what you're saying. And then underneath that, we've got the mental program for high potential talent. So around 12% there. And then going under that, the peer mental program, reverse mental programming, very, very small right at the bottom there. So some interesting research to come out of that. Maybe you can use that in your next report, David. Well, we can just show you actually. So we looked at association. So professional and industry associations separate from corporates. And you can see here what the associations are doing is targeting different member stages, which makes a lot of sense. They're looking at their student population, looking at graduates, then young members. So they're kind of following how careers develop over time. If we look at the next slide, which is companies, not associations, they much more likely to have a general program where anyone can participate. So that was the highest. And then the high potential talent program. Diversity mental programs were a bit lower, but that might have just been a particular pull. I think in associations, they would tend to be lower because the diversity programs tend to focus to be concentrated in the corporates, because they've got more, there's bigger pressure on corporates to make that happen. There's one missing off here that we do find in some countries. And that is programs which are aimed at the owners of professional body, professional firms. And what happens there is that you tend to have mentors who are people who've probably retired, but have been in the same role. They've been the chief executive of a professional firm. And so they mentor the chief executives who are younger than themselves, but are still in post. OK, so we know what people are doing within organizations now. Do we know how well organizations are doing with their mental programs? So we've obviously got the statistics on what they're doing, but how do we even measure that? Is it just a matter of asking people or how does that all work? Well, in this research, we actually ask what they were doing and how satisfied were they with the results they were getting. And we compared what they were doing with some of the best practice guidelines from standards like ISMP, which is now ISMCP, I think. It's just changed, which is some international standards for mentoring and coaching programs. So we compared what they were doing with those standards. And we found that mostly they were doing quite well, but falling down in a few of the key areas that we know really other success factors for a mentoring program, particularly around training of the mentors and the mentees who participate. So not enough of them were actually doing good quality training. And also not quite enough of following the mentoring pairs along the journey. So not enough checking in, not enough, if you like, pastoral care. This is really interesting, though. This is now, we're starting to get some big data, which is really giving us some new insights into what's happening. Came across this company, which runs a website that it's called InHerSite. So it's all about women and places that they've worked. And these women, they've had 90,000 women ranking 17 and 1 half thousand companies. It's pretty US centric, but I think it's interesting to start there. And they asked women to rate the company that they work at over a number of criteria, one of which was mentorship and sponsorship programs. And they actually found a very high correlation between the highly rated mentoring programs with loyalty and satisfaction. So basically the conclusion of this organization was if your female employees are unhappy with your mentorship program, they're much more likely to be dissatisfied at work overall, which is a little bit scary, isn't it? So we actually think there's a lot of programs out there. Some of them maybe are not being rated very well. They then start almost a squawk of companies being ranked on their mentorship program. So you'll see there some quite well-recognized names, a company like Johnson and Johnson. That's not really surprising that they have a good program, you know, Ernst and Young, LinkedIn. It's interesting to see some relatively newer organizations. So you're HubSpot and people that have emerged only recently, and LinkedIn as well. But I wonder if that's these newer style of organizations are actually embracing some of these more, you know, David's done work at Facebook, for example. Embracing more the coaching and mentoring kind of approach. I think what many organizations, these new organizations are finding is if they want to be able to react very fast, somehow you've got to create good connections between people. And so the learning process is essential. It has to be part of their culture, otherwise they can't function. So we get a lot of informal mentoring happening as well as formal mentoring. Yes. There was, just on that as well, and this ties in nicely on the news last night, there was the chairman of Beyond Blue, which is a mental health organization, and he was actually talking about the fact that mental health and the mental health of your employee should now be in the future, KPIs for actual CEO. So that sort of goes into that informal mentoring. And how do you think that's going to, what do you think that's going to have an impact on in the future, you know, mental health and actually business mentoring? Does that all play a part? And can you see a shift happening when people are becoming more aware of this stuff within the workplace? Well, I mean, mentoring as an intervention to improve well-being outcomes is one of the trends that I'm seeing certainly here in Australia, and I'd be really interested to see how that's playing out in other countries. Yes, I think so. I think it's terrific. I think CEOs should be, you know, they should be measured on their contribution to the well-being of the people in their companies, don't you, David? Yeah, it's one of those things, it's one of those things phenomena that's happening in some countries and it hasn't even been thought of in others. Really? So in Ireland and parts of North Europe, it's actually not uncommon. Yep. And also within the health industry, there's even something we were talking about earlier, which is where we have mentoring between patients who've got chronic disease mentoring the doctors. Wow. So the doctors really understand what it's like from the perspective of the patient. So there's some interesting wrinkles around this. I think we will be seeing a lot more application towards mental health areas. We've seen quite a lot of work around people with Asperger's, for example. Yep. There's lots of programs for those. Now, whether you define that as mental health or not, it's a debatable question. But nonetheless, this whole area of the way that people think and the way that they fit into the workplace and how they support the workplace, mentoring is playing an increasing role there. Well, yeah, I think a lot of it does happen now, but they are quite informal. And if you know what we're talking about, how beneficial formal programs can be, that's probably where the shift's going to happen, I would think, in the next few years, especially within Australia. We're also seeing a big rise in mentors working alongside therapists. Oh, OK. So what's happening there is that clearly the mentor cannot be a therapist and can't help somebody work with their problems. But the mentors are also somebody who can help them think about the practical side of what do they do and how do they actually manage their career in the context of a disease like schizophrenia, for example. Could be a fine line, then, couldn't it, between counselor and mentor? So they have to talk to each other? Yes, definitely. So just a little bit off there, but just going back to what you were speaking about, Melissa, and females and the role that organizations are playing now when it does come to females in the workplace. I'm really interested, especially speaking of females, David, because I know you've just written a book about females re-entering the workplace and how this all impacts that. Can you tell us a little bit more about that, what drove that to happen, and what is it all about, really? Well, essentially, when somebody comes back into the workplace, having been away on maternity leave for maybe a year, it varies from country to country, except in the states where it's two weeks or something like that, which is ridiculous. But if they've been away for a reasonable period of time, then things happen inside the organization and things happen to them as well. Being a mum changes you. And so helping people through that very significant transition proves to be a really good investment, both in terms of getting them back to their higher level, their original levels of productivity very quickly, but also in terms of whether they come back at all. So there's a much higher, those organizations that have implemented maternity mentoring have found that it has had a really big and positive impact. And that impact has been particularly high when we're talking about people at small senior levels, because the more senior you are, the more you get things done through influencing people. But if you've been away, all your influence networks have disappeared. People have learned how to get on without you. So here you are, you're a mum, you're sitting at your desk and you're wondering, what do I do now? And you're still feeling a little bit guilty and worrying about the baby at home and all those things. So having a mentor, somebody, another mum at the same level, and it is important they're at the same level, who's been through the whole process, can help you just think through, how do I re-establish myself? And it's proven one of the ones, a really major benefit for women to come back into the workplace. Melissa, have you seen any examples of this in Australia, or is it something we want to aspire to be? But not so many. I'd like to see more. And I think we were talking about it earlier, actually. I mean, this isn't new. So maternity mentoring and back-to-work, supporting women back-to-work isn't new. But I think it's having a bit of a resurgence, really. And I think it's because so many companies have diversity targets now and they need to keep their women. So there's a renewed interest in it. But I would like to see more, because I think it's a wonderful way to use mentoring. I also think with so many women going into technology in those sort of areas these days, it just changes so quickly. By the time they do get back, it's actually going to be quite daunting to actually see what does change. And to have that support network would definitely be an advantage for most women, I would guess. So there's maternity mentoring. So that was the first time I heard of that when we spoke earlier today. Ethical mentoring is something else that was briefly mentioned. So can we just touch a little bit on that? Basically, this comes out of the financial crisis. OK. It's always interesting. And all the scandals that went with that. And all the problems about large organizations, particularly financial services organizations, doing unethical things and basically not, people like the frog in boiling water, not realizing what was going on. And so the start of this was the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. And they asked us to look at how they could create a program that would create mentors who would basically, inside financial services firms, but also any kind of finance department in organization, who would be able to help people work through ethical dilemmas. And so the training for these people is partly to train them as mentors, but partly to give them some understanding of the psychology of ethicality so they can help people work through a clear process of thinking about the issues that they face. Sometimes recognizing that a dilemma is there. And so this is now spreading. There are all sorts of organizations like Diageo and the National Health Service in the UK and elsewhere, the idea that you can actually have people in the workplace who other people can come to when they either have an ethical dilemma or think they might do. And so a large part of this role is helping people build ethical resilience so the ability to know that maybe they need to step back and look at something. And so what the ethical mentors have been equipped with is some very basic tools of having those conversations that help people look at the issue, work out the values around it, work out what the conflict of values is and how to work out to manage those and then come to conclusions and test those conclusions from an ethical basis. It's almost like a conscience. Exactly, they become the corporate conscience. And in fact, many of them also now are becoming, report back to the board or the top team in the organization with a particular emphasis on helping the organization itself become more ethically minded. Interesting. Has that even begun over here? Not really. Is there anyone pushing for these change or how does just listening over the past 20 minutes also especially hearing about, you know, what's happening over in all these other countries and then what's happening in Australia? How's the connection between this happening? So obviously you both talk. You know, is there, is this sort of stuff being transferred? Is there a knowledge gap or how are we going to move forward in Australia based on what's happening overseas? Look, I think each country, the issues kind of bubble up and you deal with what's happening but there are some themes that are coming around the field. You know, we're seeing it in our politics. So why not in our organizations? Look, I just don't think, I would love if there's any banks out there, we'd love to run some ethical mentoring because that's, you know, probably not the case. Any doctors out there? Any doctors? Another one, yeah. I think this notion of picking an issue and then training up a panel or a group of people that specifically can provide mentorship around those sorts of issues. I think that's the interesting theme and I think that that is emerging everywhere around the world but the topic may be different. Maybe it's more around ethics in Europe. With us and I'm going to give an example back to the mental health, you know, it's actually happening around mental health here. Yeah, let's go back and talk about because we briefly touched on that, the fact that mentoring and mental health that can be used as a preventative measure and I think that's really important like we said a lot of organizations invest in and seeing how much benefit it can have, both financially and also with the people involved. Let's talk a little bit more about that and how that all, what you've been doing. Well, this just came out of what our clients were asking us for, just an observation really and we went and tried to look out, you know, what's some of the data around this and we know that just in Australia, untreated mental health conditions cost us an estimated $10.9 billion per year which is made up of absenteeism, which is a big problem and $146 million in compensation claims. So, you know, we know that mentoring is a way of engaging people so surely, you know, tackling that issue around absenteeism, for example. But here's some interesting things that are happening. So there's an organization here called Super Fit Mates which actually has created a peer support mentoring program that, they go into corporates primarily and they train up a cadre of mentors in that particular workplace who are trained to recognize and respond to mental health issues. So it's exactly the same concept as your panel of ethical mentors but in this case, applied to mental health. And so I know that's been rolling out in a few corporates in Australia. I think that's a terrific idea. We know that for some particular professions where they face, you know, really quite alarming depression and anxiety rates such as we know that, for example, lawyers suffer from depression and anxiety but also there are some issues for newly graduated veterinarians who may be working somewhere quite remote because they haven't been able to get a placement close to where they live. All their normal support mechanisms are broken because they've moved away. They've got very few people to talk to. So, you know, the mere fact that they've actually got somebody assigned to them as a mentor is almost like a safety net and someone that they can discuss these issues with. So we've started talking with psychologists to try and understand a little more about how this phenomenon actually works and why mentoring might contribute. And one of the things that, you know, we were talking about was we know from research that mentoring helps to build self-confidence. Now, we know that from the published research but one of the things we track from people on our programs for both mentees and mentors, self-confidence, self-efficacy is the single most important or single most reported sort of universal benefit. Even if people don't say, I'm trying to build self-confidence, they seem to get it anyway, which is really great. And what the psychologists say is, well, we know that if you can raise self-confidence, you're actually equipping people better to cope in a stressful situation. So it's actually a real preventative measure for mental wellbeing and wellness. This is just a quote from Dr. J. Spence. The factor most likely to impact the level of stress a person feels is the amount of support that person perceives that they have. You know, we'll put them in a well-supported mentoring program with a mentor. So they've got their mentor, they've got some terrific program managers who are also there to help them. You know, it's a kind of no-brainer that this would work. I do feel like it's come a long way as well. We spoke, I think it was even 12 months ago, we did a webcast last on MentorIn. The fact now we're bringing psychologists into it and we're talking about mental illness. It just shows how quickly it's moving. And I think, you know, what's some research on the other side of it? So I'm a mentor to someone else. So from, obviously, we're talking about mentees and the support they get, but I'm finding a huge amount of satisfaction actually on the other side, actually mentoring people and all these, everything that you've both been talking about today does play into that. So the fact that I'm much more highly engaged now at work. The fact that, you know, you're speaking to people and you're almost seeing your younger self in them in some way without doing the whole I told you so thing. But I find it really rewarding. So does this research cover both sides or is there other research that's done separately? Well, there's quite a lot of research around that the impact on mentors. One of the areas that I find most particularly interesting is people who, managers who've plateaued. Yes. And how do they, and what actually helps those people get a real rekindle of their interest in their career and their activity in their career. And it turns out that having a mentee is really powerful. Definitely. Because what happens is you start thinking about, well, you know, I'm helping this person think through what they're going, but I could be taking some of those lessons too. And so we find that mentors who sort of, who let their career sort of slide a little bit. They get engaged with the mentee and they think, well, I could do some more of that. And they get back into their own career management and then they get promoted. Yep. And this is a phenomenon we see time and time again inside organizations. So it's really good for the mentor to have somebody to jeez them up a little bit. Yeah, sort of invigorating, if you like. Now, before we go on to the next section, which is virtual mentoring, which is always very exciting. We've got a few questions and I just want to stay on topic here. So first one is from Jennifer. So this is in relation to ethical mentoring, but I think it can also be spoken to about the wellness program side of things. Is ethical mentoring performed in isolation from regular mentoring? They can be combined. Yep. Because obviously you may have an ethical issue come up within a mentoring relationship. But to do the job properly, you need some special training in ethical psychology. It's not a long training. It's typically a day. Yep. But you need some extra tools and techniques for it. Okay, great. Another one from Joanne and this, I think I'll ask you, Melissa. What are some good resources to assist a small not-for-profit to establish a mentoring program? I didn't know that one was going to come up. Look, there's so much free stuff on the internet. It's a question of how you find it. You know, good place to start is our website. We've got a lot of free materials. David, I think you've got a lot of free materials on your website. So I suggest go look there. We always offer, you know, preferential rates for not-for-profit. So we try and help where we can. Okay. Yeah. I guess, like we said, you know, it's just exploding now and there's so much stuff. Yeah, I think the difficulty is sorting the good stuff from the not-so-good stuff. Well, I think a word of warning there, though, is just to say, right, well, look, we're not going to, we're not going to resources to do this. So we're just going to do a mentoring thing. We're just going to, it's a disaster in most cases. And what tends to happen is because it fails, you've now created a sense when you try and reintroduce the topic from other people. Oh, yeah, remember, we tried that. It didn't work. So you have to be so careful not to fall into that trap. You want to get it right the first time, don't you? So at least invest a lot of time and try and get a budget that enables you to train people. And if you download the international standards, that's a really, that gives you a sense of what you need to do. And so that gives you an idea of what's the minimum budget you can work on if you're going to try and meet those standards. Excellent. Now, obviously, mentoring programs shouldn't be bound by location, I think, personally. And I'm really interested in hearing more about this. So on to our third area, which is where we talk about virtual mentoring programs. So depending on a lot of organizations, they may be based in different locations. What are your thoughts on virtual mentoring programs? Can they be effective? How is technology enabling this? And I'm guessing you might have a lot to say about this one, David. I mean, basically, virtual mentoring is now taking over as the dominant form of mentoring, particularly among the multinational organizations, simply because if you're going to find the right mentor for somebody, they may well be in a different part of the country or a different country entirely. And the technology makes it relatively simple, using things like Skype, for example, or other vehicles like that. You can do such a lot. It reduces the power distance, so it's much easier to relax with people if you're using the technology. If you're in the room with them, sometimes that sense of, you know, I'm very authoritarian, I'm just to listen to me. That sort of disappears, you don't pontificate so much. So, and then the other vehicles, of course, are simply by using email. If you have asynchronous emails, and so you send an email and then there is a pause for some, for the other person, then replies, what you actually build in is some really valuable thinking time. And that actually enhances the quality of the mentoring conversation. Yeah. Yeah, I think, look, we run a lot of programs that are all virtual, so nobody ever meets. The mentor and the mentor you don't meet. The program managers don't meet any of the participants. Everything's done by webinar. And it's surprisingly very, very effective. So I think for all the reasons David said, it's a bit counterintuitive that some of these methods of connecting with people are actually able to work. But, you know, if people don't have an opportunity to meet face to face and they have no alternatives, they find a way to make it work. So we find we have probably in the programs we run, maybe 20% of people will be resistant to the idea and may never ever embrace the notion of working with someone not in a face to face relationship. But if we can overcome that resistance for them and with them, they discover that actually this works quite well, what a surprise. And I know because I'm coaching and working with people right through Asia and doing it all on FaceTime. And, you know, people that I've never met. And it can be very, very effective. So there's that side of it. Then there's all the technologies, which I think we maybe talked about last time. All the technologies, the software that's around for actually just being able to track and manage mentoring programs because it can be very time intensive. And it just takes a lot of, you know, the stress away from a program manager. So I think it's exciting what technology is enabling. And I'm glad to hear you say that's becoming, it will move towards being the dominant. I think we're well on the way towards it. And interestingly, a lot of organizations are doing their training virtually as well. In fact, one of the first I ever did was, that was quite a few years ago now, was the Australian Psychological Society. Oh, there you go. So they wanted some training for their mentors across Australia. There was no way that they would get everybody together. So we did it from England on a regular series of webinars. And it worked exceedingly well. And I think so much of it is moving to in line with what the technology is making possible. Yeah, and I think that is working for Redback. I definitely understand the reluctance to technology a lot of the time. However, I think the easier technology gets and I think the more people are exposed to it. And, you know, whether it's something as simple as using FaceTime or something like this, you know, to have that sort of interaction with people. And one of the things I found that works really well is a blended mentor program. So I have someone based in Melbourne who I do mentor, but every now and then when I do get to catch up maybe once in a few months there's that excitement. It's like, oh, we get to meet face to face. Let's have breakfast or let's have a coffee. There's that element to it. So it is a little bit the best of both worlds, I guess. And that's one of the recommendations we make to our clients and to participants. And we say, mix it up. You know, it doesn't have to be all email or Skype or FaceTime. You know, sometimes have a phone call, sometimes a short phone call. Sometimes you can meet face to face. It just keeps it more interesting as well. I think so, yeah. There's a couple of things that we've been doing which was great, great fun. One is created a program which basically is, it's instructions to actually take somebody through virtual mentoring and, you know, have you done this? And so it takes, it's setting up the relationship, having the conversations. So you've got a sitting by Nelly, if you like, all the way through and that's called Mentor Master. And that's a very simple way of doing it. It's a little clunky of these things always are. But it's a way of doing it. And the other thing that I find really fascinating is this thing called ProReal, which is a virtual world. Wow. Where the mentor mentee can meet in this virtual world through avatars. I'll see you can dress up and create your own person. Yeah, well, unfortunately you can't dress up in them. But you can, of course, the avatars are all quite standard sort of shape. But you can make them bigger size colors, all sorts of things. And you can then create further avatars which relate things about the situation you're describing. So if you've got some real fears, for example, they can be a minefield behind you or your inner voice can become a great big giant. They're standing over you, shouting at you. All sorts of things you can do to be creative in this virtual world. That's where everything's going, isn't it? Yeah. Okay, now before we go into the last part, just one little thing from Lisa. And she wants to know if she could have a link to the international standards resource. Now we will be sending out a link to the recording. So can we include that in there as well? Absolutely. Excellent. Okay, now off virtual mentoring now and turning to the last topic of the webcast, sustainability, which I think everyone wants to know a little bit more about. What are some of the keys to making a mentoring program have staying power and that long lasting impact? Because obviously it's something that we're not just want to do for a one-off. And then as people go throughout the organization, we obviously want to build this as a big program that we can continue on. So let's talk sustainability. We've got a few points on the slide here. I think the most important, really probably the most important thing is having some champions that support the program. And that kind of links back to having a good reason to have the program in the first place. If it becomes a nice to have mentoring program, then it really won't last. Setting expectations for everyone participating and training the people that participate. David, you've got some research around what happens if you don't train people. Yeah, but basically, if you don't train anybody, your maximum you get is three relationships out of 10 delivering significant value. If you train the mentors, you double that. If you train the mentors and the mentees and brief their line managers, if they have them, then you push it up to 95%. That's a lot for a little bit of investment in terms of time, isn't it? Yeah. These are the sorts of things that if you don't get that right, this is why programs fall over. Not highlighting and celebrating the checkpoints, acknowledging we're halfway through a six or a 12 month program and bringing people back together to talk to one another and get ideas, keeping on providing support and encouraging commitment. And really under investing, I think the point we're coming to now is if you can't support and do mentoring well, then you're actually better off not to start because it can be very brand damaging actually if you don't do it well as we're discovering from in her website about all those companies that have poorly ranked programs. We found a while ago that one of the reasons that people, the young graduates didn't join some of the professional services firms was because it was perceived that their mentoring program for when they would go to when they joined wasn't good enough. No. So, I think that's... Pretty good feedback. It's pretty good feedback, yeah. Because particularly the generations coming into the workforce now expect it. Yes. And so they've got an idea of what the standard should be and if it isn't good enough and they'll talk to other people in the firm or to their friends and so forth, if it isn't good enough then you're actually losing some of that talent. So, I think that's quite a challenge. There's a few other things too that we found that are helpful. One is that actually measurement as you go along, there's a direct correlation between the measurement that you do and the sustainability of the relationships. So, if you measure people and ask them about how the relationship is going, people then encourage them to have a conversation about it that actually they think about it and therefore they actually improve the quality and depth of the conversations they have. So, managing endings is an important thing too. If you just let the relationships drift away at the end of the program, there is a very high level of dissatisfaction amongst mentors and mentees subsequently because they're not really sure. Did I add any value to what was it appreciated? Yeah. Did I do something wrong? If you actually celebrate the endings of all the relationships and make sure they review it, say thank you to each other, basically you make it a very positive process for the ending, then you find that the vast majority of mentors and mentees look back at it and say, that was pretty good. Now, those are people who are going to be talking to other people who may be coming into the program. It's all word of mouth at the end of the day, isn't it? So, the sustainability is about what are the people saying when they've been through the mentoring process? So, making that ending really work, I think, is important. We've also found some interesting stuff around accrediting mentors or supporting mentors through supervision. The more that mentors feel that they have this support to develop their skills, that there's a sort of professionalization of themselves in this, the more committed they are to the program and the more likely they are to recommend it to other people as well. Excellent. Some great stats there. Before we move on, we've got some questions that have come through, but I would just like to encourage everyone to complete the survey, which is located in the tab next to the PowerPoint slides. Obviously, it'll be great to get some feedback. Nice segue there. See that? And what we've spoken about today, but also put your details in if you do want to receive some additional information from art of mentoring and any additional resources we've spoken about today. We can also include those, I'm assuming, yeah. Now, I just want to touch on a few questions because I do realize we are getting close to time. First of all, one that's just standing out to me, who's responsible for this in an organization? Because I think depending on the size of an organization, and depending on the honor he said, she said, is there, do we see in the future, our mentoring manager as part of an organization? Is that what you both want to aim for or think that's the ideal scenario? Or are there other people who can take on these roles to manage these programs in the meantime? It's interesting. Yes, there are mentoring managers. So in associations in particular, you tend to have full-time or part-time people who look after the programs because many of them are big. We've got hundreds of pairs. In corporates, it's often the HR people, learning from development. But increasingly, and David, we were talking about this before, organizations are saying, we don't have anybody internal to do this. We need to actually outsource the whole thing and have somebody manage it. You still need the internal champion to make sure you're getting the right people in and to keep the raw, raw factor up. But actually, you can have somebody else come in and manage the program. You're seeing that trend in your... Yeah, and we've run periodically programs to train mentoring program managers. Wow. And that just gives them... Equips them with all the knowledge that they need to be able to do a really good job of it. And it enables them to network with other people who are running programs. That I think is a very important thing. That if you are a mentoring program manager, build your own network of other people who you can benchmark against. Wow. So is there a mentor in association? Oh! What a good idea. Four mentors. Maybe we should start one. There you go. But we've got in Europe, we've got the European Mentoring and Coaching Council. Oh, OK. Which started life as the European Mentoring Centre. Oh. But then we brought in the coaches because internal coaching and mentoring are pretty similar. Yeah. There's a lot of similarities between them. And that is basically, obviously in Europe, but it has associations with some other countries. We're looking at maybe doing something here with EMCC. Yeah. So just some questions that have come through. So from Roz and something I need to write down as well, the name of the virtual space with avatars that you were talking about. It's called ProReal. That's P-R-O-Real. R-E-A-L. Yeah. And there's some nice demos from the guy running at David Tinker on YouTube. Oh, OK. David Tinker on YouTube. OK. So also from Derek. So just what we were talking about, about administering our programs. How can an association that administers a mentor program help manage the ending of the mentor or mentee relationship? Well, what we do is we start sending people reminders about a month before the program finishes. OK. So just asking them to have a meeting with their partner and start talking about how the mentoring relationship will transition into something else, whether that's an informal arrangement or perhaps they'll choose to end. But having that meeting and as David said, if you don't manage the ending well, it's really important to do that well. So it's really about being part of it from beginning to end. That's what I'm sensing here, isn't it? Obviously having that goal in mind from the beginning. So as an organization, you're still on top of everything that's happening. Yeah. We're currently looking into how can we actually have a sort of party for a cohort of mentors online? That would be encourage for a few people. Well, we're actually trying to design virtual parties to say thank you. And certainly those programs where they've actually brought everybody together to celebrate, it's very, very emotional when people talk about their experience. But it has a very big impact because you can showcase, you can use the people from one program, from one cohort to actually be, to talk about their experience, which really encourages the next cohort. Exactly. They become ambassadors. And you do hear some wonderful stories. Yeah. It's my favorite meeting. Yeah, I guess it would be. Also for Jennifer, yes, the information is available afterwards. We will be sending a copy of the recording of the webcast, so please keep an eye out for that. And also from Louise, so can we access the data of the research you spoke about in terms of training outcomes? What was the report that you actually did reference, which is going back to the beginning. If you don't train your participants and the percentage of success relationships, that data that we were speaking about. That's data that's extrapolated from the international standards. Oh, okay. So, but I don't know whether that's on the website or not. Okay. Yeah. And the research I talked about, there's an insight report, which is on our website. Insight. So people can download that. Excellent. Okay. Well, that brings us to the end. Actually, we've got one more site question, which I think this might relate to the previous one. So what are some examples of mentoring metrics? So, i.e., what are some success measures? Hmm. Do you want to add this one? Yeah. There are program managers and there are relationship managers. So the program managers would relate to what was the purpose of it. So if the purpose was retention, you can measure retention. That's fairly straightforward. Relationship measures, there are four things that we've identified from very long-term research around this. One is what's happened for the individual in terms of their career. The second one is what's happened in terms of their learning. And the third one is what's happened in terms of what we call enabling outcomes. Those are things like having a better personal development plan, a clear idea of where you want to go, you know, greatest and so forth. And the fourth one is emotional. So what's happened in terms of building your self-efficacy and your self-confidence? Those are the four key things that we measure. And we measure them for mentors and mentees because they both get some of those. They both matter, definitely. Melissa? Very good. Yeah, I mean, focus, I guess, on did the mentee achieve the outcomes that they were looking for? One of the things we've started doing is going back a year or two afterwards to see what outcomes there are further down the track. Yeah. And that's starting to be quite interesting. Yeah. Very interesting. All right, well, that does bring us to the end. I'd like to personally thank everyone for joining as well as Melissa. Lovely to have you back again. Thank you. And also, David, thank you so much. Great to be here. We hope you enjoy the rest of your time in Sydney. It's been great. For those of you who would like more information, like I said, please complete the survey. There are details in there to put in your details. Otherwise, we will be sending out the recording along with any supporting materials. Otherwise, that's all for us. Feel free to check out the Art of Mentoring website. And if you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us directly. Otherwise, enjoy the rest of your day. Bye for now. The rest of your day.