APM Mentoring Session on 12th November 2013

On 12th November, I was invited by the APM Midlands’ Branch to present on Mentoring for Project Professionals. This isn’t a usual topic of mine, but as my intensive one-to-one and group mentoring is becoming known, it seemed a good idea to share my ideas and experience. After weeks of discussions with Adrian Turner of the APM, I realised that it would make more sense to model mentoring rather than presenting on it! I decided to run a facilitated session and, with Adrian’s agreement, that’s what happened.

You can download the outputs of the APM Midlands Mentoring session here.

I decided to run a ‘World Café’ style event, splitting the group into five tables, each with six or seven participants. I posed questions for discussion while the ‘host’ of each group ensured that the main points were recorded on a large paper tablecloth. After fifteen minutes of discussion, everyone, bar the host, moved to different tables. There were three rounds in total, each with a set of questions:
1. What are the benefits of mentoring for (a) the mentor (b) the mentee? What are the benefits of different types of mentoring e.g. one-to-one versus group; face-to-face versus virtual; generalist versus specialist?
2. What do you expect of a mentor, mentee, the relationship? What happens if things go wrong?
3. How would you go about setting up or improving mentoring for project professionals for your organisation? What is your plan from here?

At the end of the session, I asked each group for their top three key points and drew these up to create a visual summary of the evening:

You can read all the details of each group’s discussions in the outputs here.

If you’re interested in either individual or group mentoring, why not get in touch with us at [email protected] for an initial discussion?