How can mentoring support leadership and development?

by Kate Oliver

As part of developing the Future Leaders Network (FLN), we’ve been thinking about the role of mentoring in the charity sector.  

Whether as a mentor or mentee, mentoring can be a really valuable part of supporting people to develop their careers. For mentees, in particular, it can provide support beyond your immediate organisation or peers, and there can be real benefit to having someone else to bounce ideas off, help you find solutions to tricky problems and to move forward in your career - whatever that looks like to you.

We know that lots of people have had great experiences of mentoring. However, we also know that there can be challenges accessing a mentor, and that a mentoring relationship doesn’t always provide us with what we’d hoped it would.

Expanding access to mentoring is something we’re particularly interested in at the FLN. As we’ve been pulling together our plans, we’ve found ourselves reflecting on the impact of mentoring, and the effect it has had on our careers and leadership journeys. As part of our conversations, we thought about how mentoring has helped us, what we wish we’d have known about mentoring before we started, and what we’ve learnt along the way.

Finding the right mentor for you

Reflecting on my own experience, the one thing I’d wish I’d known to consider is that you don’t need to stick with the first mentor you find, if you realise that you’re just not clicking. I've been lucky enough to have a few different mentors over the last ten years, and each one of them has offered me something different. A really important part of finding the right mentor for you (and this applies to mentees too!) is thinking through the key aspects you want to align on.

I've had mentors in the past who shared my career experience and ambitions, but didn't necessarily reflect my values, and vice versa - so I would really recommend having a good think about where you want your mentor to help you, and that might mean realising it’s time to respectfully part ways. My current mentor is the perfect mix for me: someone who knows about my general field of work, but more importantly shares some of my life experiences and views, which means that I'm really open to her help and challenge because the foundations of respect and understanding are already there.

The benefits of being a mentor

In our conversations about the benefits and impact of mentoring, Grace shared that it’s also very rare that mentoring only benefits the person being mentored. Being a mentor is a brilliant way to build your own management and leadership skills. Within the sector, it can be easy to find yourself in a catch-22, where you want to take a step up and become a manager but it can be hard to do that without experience to show you can. Becoming a mentor can really help there.

You might not be managing someone day-to-day, but you will be helping them to problem solve, to achieve their aims and objectives and to identify and address their development needs. These are all key things a manager needs to be able to do and it gives you great experience to talk about in interviews. Plus, it can be hugely rewarding knowing you’ve supported someone else to develop in their career. 

Getting another perspective

Holly has equally benefited from being both a mentor and a mentee. In terms of being mentored, she’s hugely appreciated the advice and alternative perspective that having this relationship with someone outside of her organisation has provided her with. She’s been fortunate to have wise and inspiring mentors who have been incredibly supportive of her development and thinking through her career and leadership aspirations as much as day to day challenges.  

What is clear to us is that mentoring can offer us an insight into not just what it’s like to be a leader, but also how to use our skills and expertise most effectively, how to grow our networks, and how to seek advice and inspiration when we need it the most.

Making sure that more people can access that support is particularly important to us and we’ll be sharing more information with our members about our plans in this area very soon. If you haven’t already, sign up to the Future Leaders Network to be the first to hear about it.

How could flexible working open up leadership?

by Grace Brownfield

Last week, I spotted a few tweets about how remote working is not the same thing as flexible working. It was such a simple sentiment but got me thinking, and reminded me it’s a nuance we’re at risk of missing in the debate about the future of charity sector working post-Covid.

Of course, remote working can – and often is – an important part of flexible working. But that’s only the case if it’s backed up by an organisational culture and policies that promote and enable that flexibility.

Part-time or compressed hours, job sharing and core hours with flexible start and finish times are all good examples of the flexibility organisations can offer – and that’s certainly not an exhaustive list. In the wake of Covid, it is perhaps more important than ever that we have a proper conversation across the sector – and society more widely – about the flexibility people want and need.

It is important to recognise that there are a number of reasons why people might want flexibility, and that it can benefit people in many different ways when it comes to work-life balance. It might be to enable someone to manage their health condition or caring responsibilities, or to spend time on other passions outside work.

As organisations make decisions on the future of office space, and longer-term shifts over where people work, will enough consideration be given to other forms of flexibility too? And how can we facilitate a wider discussion on what that might look like?

Leading by example

Working in the charity sector creates an added dynamic around work-life balance. When you’re passionate about your work and also continually surrounded by the enormity and urgency of the problem your charity is trying to tackle, it’s easy to feel the pressure to give everything you have to the cause.

That’s what makes it so important that leaders set the right tone within organisations. Reminding people that your passion for a cause, and your effectiveness at your role, isn’t measured by the hours you work, but by the outcomes you achieve.

As we look ahead (hopefully) to a post-Covid world, we have to remind ourselves what we know about what actually helps people work effectively. Usually that means not forcing people towards one dominant working style (no matter how flexible organisational leaders might think that one option is) but rather offering people a range of options for how they work: working together to find out which one will enable people to be most effective in their role and provide them with the work-life balance they want or need.  

Broadening leadership through flexible working

The other interesting thing about this would be what it means for diversity. Would enabling more flexibility not only create more accessible workplaces, but also lead to more diversity within leadership roles too?

In considering these questions, I was reminded of a recent event run by another network - Women in Public Affairs – about job sharing. Despite some great examples of people leading the way in job sharing roles, it is still far from commonplace in the charity sector and it’s probably fair to say we lag behind other sectors – such as the civil service – where it’s much more common.

Historically, job sharing has often been seen as a flexible option for people with caring responsibilities. But could job sharing – and other forms of flexibility - actually be a key part of making leadership more manageable, for more people, regardless of the reason behind this? For example, on job sharing specifically – would enabling people to share responsibility with someone else and therefore to step away from the role for part of the week make it a much more attractive, and realistic, option for more people?

Flexibility as the norm

Flexible working shouldn’t only be reserved for a certain set of circumstances that are seen to justify the need for it, it should be something open to everyone as a way of helping manage work-life balance.

The prospect of genuine and increased flexibility across the sector is exciting – even if we are unlikely to achieve it overnight. The idea that more people could become charity sector leaders, as a result of greater flexible working practices, would be a real positive. None of us are just one thing, and we are better for all the different roles and passions we have. The charity sector, of all places, should be the place that recognises that and, in doing so, it is likely to lead to better outcomes all round.  

So, as we look ahead, what should be considered when it comes to creating flexibility in the charity sector? What sort of flexibility would you like to see? How might that benefit individuals, organisations and the sector as a whole? What examples are there of good practice already out there? We’d love to hear from you – get in touch or leave a comment below.