Posted on November 8, 2009 // 0 Comments

Welcome to a short overview of Enterprise Mentor.

In the next 10 slides, you’ll learn exactly what Enterprise Mentor is, how you can use it to develop your people, and why it can be a key tool to help the growth of your business.

You’ll also learn why turning your line-managers into mentors is critical to improving your organization’s revenues and profits.

But first let’s start by looking at the big picture, and examine the high-level goals which, arguably, every business around the world works towards.

These are most likely the same goals you want to achieve in your own company too.

Regardless of your industry, whether you sell products or services, or B2B or B2C, your CEO, VPs, executives and Directors all want to see more revenue and profit growth – from turning more prospects into paying customers, turning more customers into repeat customers – and turning more repeat customers into referral customers.

Your executives want to retain more of your existing clients and stop loosing customers through churn.

They want your company to be relevant to your customers, to stand out above your competitors – and to be known for excellence and an unsurpassed attention to customers’ needs.

Ask the same business leaders what they want from your employees and it’s a greater level of performance and productivity.

It’s more engaged and motivated employees.

It’s a higher level of morale in your teams, and it’s keeping hold of and retaining your key staff, the very people who are instrumental in driving your business forward.

In recent years there have been many studies by leading HR consultancies around the world, such as Towers Perrrin, the Gallup Organization and Watson Wyatt who have conclusively proven the link between engaged passionate employees and higher levels of business growth.

Simply put, engaged employees lead to engaged customers, which lead to higher levels of revenue and profits.

Whereas if your employees are unengaged, have low morale and are indifferent to your company, then your customers pick up on this and feel unengaged too, which naturally leads to lower levels of revenue and profits.

Therefore the key to consistently growing your business is to create teams of passionate, motivated and engaged employees – who put your customers at the centre of everything they do, and believe passionately in your business.

When your prospects and customers pick up on the belief, confidence and energy of your employees, it gives them more and more reasons to buy from you, buy again and then recommend you.

We have found that the key to creating engaged employees are line-managers.

Line-managers have an untold impact on the level of engagement and morale of your employees.

Your line-managers can inspire your employees to achieve more than they ever thought possible, or they can crush the spirits of your teams and strangle the life and energy out of individuals.

As a business leader, you must recognise the crucial role your line-managers play in the growth of your company and give them the tools to become better man-managers and mentors, so they take on the responsibility for getting the best from your employees.

The morale and engagement of employees in your organisation is not solely the responsibility of your HR or Learning and development departments. Although HR and L&D are key influencers, the day-to-day level of employee motivation comes from their own line-managers.

HR and L&D must however seek to give line-managers the tools to get the most from their teams.

What we have found is that when you give line-managers the tools and strategies to become mentors to their teams, and when your line-managers create mentor groups, then managers can create a much deeper level of engagement and motivation with their employees.

A mentor group may only be a manager and five employees, but that can create all the difference which is needed to make a team perform at an exceptional level.

The key here is for your managers to become mentors.

Mentoring has long since been the preferred people development choice for high achievers.

Outside of business, athletes, sports stars, entertainers, academics and leaders all have their own personal mentors who provide them with guidance, direction and knowledge.

In business, external mentors often come in and work one-to-one with the CEO and board, but traditional mentoring at this level is very costly, and because of that it is prohibitively expensive to get mentoring down to the front-line in your organisation  where the people who day to day deal with your customers reside.

Arguably though, it is these front-line employees, more than any other people who would benefit from mentoring and having their own personal, professional and business development programme.

However, when you turn  your line-managers into mentors and give them the tools and strategies so they can successfully mentor their own teams, then the results you can achieve are transformational.

By leveraging your line managers who are already recognised as a cost in your Profit and loss account, the additional investment needed to implement an enterprise-wide mentoring programme is minimal, yet the results you can achieve are transformational.

In short, by turning your line-managers into mentors, and giving them the tools so they can mentor their own staff, you start to get your front-line employees thinking more like your CEO and senior executives, so that every employee in your organisation understands your business at a deeper commercial level.

The mentoring approach that we’ve found really works is a two-step approach, where employees (mentees) first receive a combination of digital mentoring, which could either be delivered on an mp3 player, or delivered through a computer through multi-media mentoring sessions and workbook exercises, together with face-to-face mentoring sessions with line managers, who create small mentoring groups with about five mentees.

Over the past few years we have developed Enterprise Mentor, a set of 20 digital mentoring sessions and follow-through activities.

Each mentoring session is around 15 minutes long.

It is these digital mentoring sessions which mentees first listen to or watch, either one or two sessions per week.

Once they’ve completed the digital mentoring session and the workbook exercises, they then meet face to face with their line-manager and fellow mentees. These face-to-face sessions bring the learning from the digital mentoring sessions back to their own jobs and allow them to discuss and apply what they’ve just learnt.

The 20 mentoring sessions are broken down into three core themes.

The first five sessions focus on customers and look at the importance of being relevant, of creating repeat and referral customers, as well as taking an in-depth look at the fundamentals of business.

Sessions 6 to 10 focus on the team, and look at areas such as having a common purpose, communication, motivation and creating belief in every team member.

The final part of the course, sessions 11 to 20, focus on the individual as an employee, giving them a new personal leadership ability so they can achieve more from themselves than they ever thought possible.

Enterprise Mentor has been developed after extensive research and interviews with some of the most respected business leaders. Each of the 20 mentoring sessions has been built from the ground up to bring the best-of-the best thinking of these business leaders to your employees.

This combination of digital mentoring, workbook exercises and face-to-face mentoring forms the backbone of Enterprise Mentor.

But by adding in a series of extra steps, the change in behaviour of mentees is truly transformational and long lasting.

These extra ‘value added’ activities which form part of the 7-step approach of Enterprise Mentor include:

- Listening to summary mentoring sessions. Here mentees can re-listen to the entire mentoring programme in about 1 hour (rather than the full six hours which makes up the main mentoring programme).

- Presentations from mentees. This is where mentees present back to their line managers and other senior executives all that they have learnt in the programme.

- Mentees becoming mentors themselves. In certain instances, mentees will become mentors to other employees in your organisation.

- Other follow-through activities such as seminars, workshops, blogs and offsite retreats keep the principles taught in Enterprise Mentor alive in your company.

This multiple level mentoring approach is proven to deliver results in a way – and at a price point that few other learning interventions can offer.

You can read more about the 7-step mentoring approach in the book People Upgrade. People Upgrade can be downloaded for free from www.enterpriseleadrs.com.

As an organisation, you have two choices on how best to deliver the digital mentoring element of Enterprise Mentor to your teams.

Mentees can receive the programme on their mobile phones or mp3 players, so they have the 20 digital mentoring sessions with them at all times. They can literally learn from the mentoring sessions whether they are walking to work, on a train, in the gym, or at home relaxing.

By putting the mentoring programme on a portable MP3 device, you eliminate virtually all barriers to learning.

It truly is mentoring at a time and place to suit every employee.

Alternatively, you can put the mentoring sessions on a central server which has a simpler implementation approach, and your employees can use their computers to access the mentoring programme either at work, or at home through the internet.

Both approaches have their advantages and will suit some people and organizations more than others.

In your own company, you may prefer mobile-mentoring or e-mentoring, or a combination of both, but the key to achieving lasting change is to combine the digital mentoring element with face-to-face mentoring from line-managers.

From an organisational perspective, the benefits of Enterprise Mentoring are far reaching. On this final slide, let’s take a quick look at the core benefits for each of the key stakeholders in your organisation.

- From a CEOs perspective, engaged employees lead to engaged customers, which lead to higher levels of revenue, profits and growth in company value.

As CEOs are charged with growing the value of the business, they recognise the critical role employees play in business growth and see the clear link between people and profit.

- From a sales and marketing perspective, you’ll see more repeat and referral customers. Your marketing may bring in new customers in the first instance, but whether customers repeat buy from you or recommend you is down to the experience they have with the employees in your company.

In many ways, Enterprise Mentor can be seen as an investment in marketing, as opposed to a straight investment in your people. When you teach your employees about the life-time value of a customer, and how their actions impact a customers desire to recommend your company, this now becomes a conversation about marketing and sales.

- From an HR perspective, HR executives are able to get more engaged and motivated employees, leading to higher levels of retention of key staff.

One of the main challenges for managers around the world is how to reduce attrition and staff turnover, and increase the retention of key staff. It’s often said that employees leave managers and not companies, but when you turn your line-managers into mentors who create higher levels of engagement and motivation, you give your employees more reasons to stay. When as a company you become more profitable, you create more profits which can be shared with your front-line employees in terms of bonuses or other performance related rewards.

- From a learning and development perspective, Enterprise Mentor is a low-cost, easy to deploy scalable programme. Whether you host the programme on your central Learning Management System, on your intranet, or give your employees pre-loaded MP3 players or MicroSD cards to insert into their mobile phones, Enterprise Mentor is a rapidly deployable approach to developing your people, which you can manage entirely in-house.

Enterprise Mentor does not require external coaches or consultants to come in.

Although you may prefer to bring in outside help, it is certainly possible for you to deploy Enterprise Mentor throughout your entire organisation without any additional outside resources.

- From a manager’s perspective, your managers are able to use Enterprise Mentor to get the very best from their employees. Managers are constantly looking for new ways to engage, motivate and inspire their teams.

Enterprise Mentor gives them the tools, framework and language to take their employees on a journey of personal and professional development, and really involve them in the business in a way they seldom will have experienced before.

- Finally, from an employee’s perspective, your employees recognise that the company is investing in their development, it’s involving them in your business and recognising the value of their ideas, and the input they can have in your organisation.

In fact, part of the mentoring programme is for your employees to suggest changes they would make if they were CEO for a day. Companies can take away literally thousands of new business growth, productivity improvement and cost saving ideas from the very front-line employees who day-in-day out deal with your customers.

Enterprise Mentor brings a new approach to people and business development.

It recognises the link between business growth and engaged, motivated employees…  and gives you the tools to strengthen the link between your people and your profits. It does this by giving your line-managers the tools to become mentors to your employees.

To learn more about bringing Enterprise Mentor to your company, simply visit www.enterpriseleaders.com.

Category : Blog