What is Enterprise Mentor

Posted on December 24, 2009 // 0 Comments

In the next ten minutes I’d like to explain to you what Enterprise Mentor is and show you an example of how and why it works. At it’s heart Enterprise Mentor is a personal, professional and business development programme which focuses on three key areas of your organisation: 1: Creating more engaged, passionate and motivated employees, 2: Increasing revenues and profits by delivering higher levels of service for your customers so they want to repeat buy and recommend you, and 3: Creating a company which is innovative, creative and full of new business growth ideas.
As its name suggests, Enterprise Mentor is an enterprise-wide mentoring programme, and where traditionally mentoring is only for CEO and board level executives, Enterprise Mentor is for every employee in your organisation. Using low-cost, scalable and easy deployable tools and methods, Enterprise Mentor brings people development to every corner of your company delivering transformational results, at a price point that few other learning approaches can match.
Although Enterprise Mentor is clearly about people, in an organisation people development often gets siloed into the HR or training departments. In reality though, getting the best from employees so they deliver the greatest experience for customers is the responsibility of every executive and manager. Therefore, Enterprise Mentor is for every department and every employee in a company including employees and managers in finance, sales, marketing, customer service, operations and admin.
With the scene set, let’s now take a look at what makes up Enterprise Mentor. At its core are 20 digital mentoring sessions which your employees can listen to on their MP3 players, mobile phones or watch on a CD-Rom, through the internet, or via your Learning Management System. In the mentoring sessions employees learn essential business lessons focused around three core themes: customers, teams and personal leadership. These lessons have been created from the ground up for employees and managers, and are based on interviews with 50 award winning-business leaders and entrepreneurs.
The second part of Enterprise Mentor is face-to-face mentoring sessions between mentor and mentees. This is a critical element of Enterprise Mentor and is designed to get the best from your employees. Where other mentoring programmes bring in the help of expensive outside mentors, Enterprise Mentor gets your line-managers to become mentors to small groups of mentees, allowing you to leverage the investment you already make in your line-managers.
The third key element of Enterprise Mentor is the generation and capturing of new business growth ideas. These ideas can either be generated and captured through workbooks which mentees can write in, or through an online social media platform such as Yammer, Google Wave or a whole host of other Enterprise 2.0 collaboration tools.
In addition to these three core elements there are four extra components to Enterprise Mentor, these include summary sessions, presentations, mentees becoming mentors, and follow-on activities. You can read more about these extra elements at www.enterpriseleaders.com.
Now you know what the core tools of Enterprise Mentor are, let me give you a quick example of how it works in an organisation. To do this, let’s take the example of Sarah. Sarah manages a small team of five people at Amroze Technology. In her team are Sally, George, Michelle, David and Amanda. The team is doing ok, but Sarah knows that they can perform at a higher level, and she wants to get her entire team focused on the business and help them see the company through her eyes, and the eyes of her senior management team. With the help of Enterprise Mentor, she takes her small team  on an engaging, enjoyable and inspirational journey of personal, professional and business development.
Each member of Sarah’s team is given a copy of Enterprise Mentor’s 20 digital mentoring sessions. Sally receives the programme in MP3 format and listens to it on her mobile phone. George accesses the multi-media version of Enterprise mentor through his computer, Michelle listens to the programme on her MP3 player, David through the companies Learning Management System and Amanda receives a CD-Rom. Sarah as the mentor chooses to use her mobile phone to listen to the digital mentoring sessions. It’s important that each person can access the digital mentoring sessions at a time and place which suits them – and in a learning format which best fits their learning style.
Each of the mentees study one or two of the mentoring sessions a week, some mentees study them at work, some at home and some on the move. The 20 digital mentoring sessions includes subjects such as “how to increase the life-time value of a customer, how to get more word of mouth referral customers, why all employees must see themselves as a sales person – as well as team development subjects such as motivation and communication and a whole host of personal leadership tools which get the very best from each mentee.
As part of each digital mentoring session, each mentee is asked to complete a series of written exercises which are made available to them through workbooks or online. During these sessions mentees are asked what suggestions and ideas they would put forward if they were CEO for a day.
For Sarah, this means that from her group of just five employees, each session generates 25 new business growth, profit improvement, cost saving, and new product innovation ideas. Ideas which were already in the workforce, but with the help of the digital and face-to-face mentoring sessions have been identified, captured and discussed.
Every Friday at 3pm Sarah brings her whole team of mentees together in a room where they discuss what they’ve learnt from the mentoring sessions, the ideas they have generated and what they can apply from the programme back into their work. Because each mentee has already studied the same material during the week and completed the written exercises, they are full of ideas on how to use the learning, and new ideas for the benefit of their company. These mentor sessions also give Sarah chance to see a different side of her team, and understand the different talents of each team member.
In Sarah’s company, Amroze Technology, they have decided to implement Google Wave, a social media platform where each idea the mentees suggest can be made available so the whole organisation can comment on and add value to those ideas. For more information about using Enterprise Mentor with Social Media platforms, watch our presentation at www.enterpriseleaders.com.
Throughout Amroze Technology, other mentor groups are springing up as line-managers lead their teams through the Enterprise Mentor programme generating literally thousands of new business growth ideas which are captured in a central social media platform.
The results which Amroze Technology have seen from implementing Enterprise Mentoring have been transformational. Employees have become more energised, engaged,  motivated and creative. Customers now get a much greater experience, as every employee in the company, whether they are customer facing or not have become more attentive, and take more ownership and responsibility for making customers want to repeat buy and recommend Amroze. Employees have become more creative too, as they have identified literally thousands of new business growth, cost saving and product improvement ideas.
Enterprise Mentoring works where other learning interventions fail because the learning takes place in the work environment under the direction of line-managers. By putting employee development in the hands of your line-managers and giving them the tools to become better man-managers, mentors and leaders, means that the learning from the mentoring sessions gets implemented, as line-managers are fully involved in the development experience and have close responsibility for its outcome.
Enterprise Mentoring also creates a tighter bond between your employee and managers – something that doesn’t necessarily happen in traditional employee development and learning programmes. This tighter bond is created because mentors and mentees embark on their mentoring journey together, and mentors get to know more about the teams they manage. Mentees also get to learn more about their mentor – and they start to see business through their eyes.
One of the other key benefits of Enterprise Mentoring is from a financial perspective. Enterprise Mentoring delivers a greater return on your payroll expense. In a company with around 100 employees, it’s quite likely that your payroll expense could well be in the region of £3m per year or more, but by getting your line-managers to take a lead in your mentoring employees, you can get significantly higher levels of productivity and performance from your workforce, for a tiny extra financial investment in your people.
To learn more about Enterprise Mentor and what it can do for your business, why not join us at one of our workshops or visit us online at www.enterpriseleaders.com.

In the next ten minutes I’d like to explain to you what Enterprise Mentor is and show you an example of how and why it works. At it’s heart Enterprise Mentor is a personal, professional and business development programme which focuses on three key areas of your organisation: 1: Creating more engaged, passionate and motivated employees, 2: Increasing revenues and profits by delivering higher levels of service for your customers so they want to repeat buy and recommend you, and 3: Creating a company which is innovative, creative and full of new business growth ideas.

As its name suggests, Enterprise Mentor is an enterprise-wide mentoring programme, and where traditionally mentoring is only for CEO and board level executives, Enterprise Mentor is for every employee in your organisation. Using low-cost, scalable and easy deployable tools and methods, Enterprise Mentor brings people development to every corner of your company delivering transformational results, at a price point that few other learning approaches can match.

Although Enterprise Mentor is clearly about people, in an organisation people development often gets siloed into the HR or training departments. In reality though, getting the best from employees so they deliver the greatest experience for customers is the responsibility of every executive and manager. Therefore, Enterprise Mentor is for every department and every employee in a company including employees and managers in finance, sales, marketing, customer service, operations and admin.

With the scene set, let’s now take a look at what makes up Enterprise Mentor. At its core are 20 digital mentoring sessions which your employees can listen to on their MP3 players, mobile phones or watch on a CD-Rom, through the internet, or via your Learning Management System. In the mentoring sessions employees learn essential business lessons focused around three core themes: customers, teams and personal leadership. These lessons have been created from the ground up for employees and managers, and are based on interviews with 50 award winning-business leaders and entrepreneurs.

The second part of Enterprise Mentor is face-to-face mentoring sessions between mentor and mentees. This is a critical element of Enterprise Mentor and is designed to get the best from your employees. Where other mentoring programmes bring in the help of expensive outside mentors, Enterprise Mentor gets your line-managers to become mentors to small groups of mentees, allowing you to leverage the investment you already make in your line-managers.

The third key element of Enterprise Mentor is the generation and capturing of new business growth ideas. These ideas can either be generated and captured through workbooks which mentees can write in, or through an online social media platform such as Yammer, Google Wave or a whole host of other Enterprise 2.0 collaboration tools.

In addition to these three core elements there are four extra components to Enterprise Mentor, these include summary sessions, presentations, mentees becoming mentors, and follow-on activities. You can read more about these extra elements at www.enterpriseleaders.com.

Now you know what the core tools of Enterprise Mentor are, let me give you a quick example of how it works in an organisation. To do this, let’s take the example of Sarah. Sarah manages a small team of five people at Amroze Technology. In her team are Sally, George, Michelle, David and Amanda. The team is doing ok, but Sarah knows that they can perform at a higher level, and she wants to get her entire team focused on the business and help them see the company through her eyes, and the eyes of her senior management team. With the help of Enterprise Mentor, she takes her small team  on an engaging, enjoyable and inspirational journey of personal, professional and business development.

Each member of Sarah’s team is given a copy of Enterprise Mentor’s 20 digital mentoring sessions. Sally receives the programme in MP3 format and listens to it on her mobile phone. George accesses the multi-media version of Enterprise mentor through his computer, Michelle listens to the programme on her MP3 player, David through the companies Learning Management System and Amanda receives a CD-Rom. Sarah as the mentor chooses to use her mobile phone to listen to the digital mentoring sessions. It’s important that each person can access the digital mentoring sessions at a time and place which suits them – and in a learning format which best fits their learning style.

Each of the mentees study one or two of the mentoring sessions a week, some mentees study them at work, some at home and some on the move. The 20 digital mentoring sessions includes subjects such as “how to increase the life-time value of a customer, how to get more word of mouth referral customers, why all employees must see themselves as a sales person – as well as team development subjects such as motivation and communication and a whole host of personal leadership tools which get the very best from each mentee.

As part of each digital mentoring session, each mentee is asked to complete a series of written exercises which are made available to them through workbooks or online. During these sessions mentees are asked what suggestions and ideas they would put forward if they were CEO for a day.

For Sarah, this means that from her group of just five employees, each session generates 25 new business growth, profit improvement, cost saving, and new product innovation ideas. Ideas which were already in the workforce, but with the help of the digital and face-to-face mentoring sessions have been identified, captured and discussed.

Every Friday at 3pm Sarah brings her whole team of mentees together in a room where they discuss what they’ve learnt from the mentoring sessions, the ideas they have generated and what they can apply from the programme back into their work. Because each mentee has already studied the same material during the week and completed the written exercises, they are full of ideas on how to use the learning, and new ideas for the benefit of their company. These mentor sessions also give Sarah chance to see a different side of her team, and understand the different talents of each team member.

In Sarah’s company, Amroze Technology, they have decided to implement Google Wave, a social media platform where each idea the mentees suggest can be made available so the whole organisation can comment on and add value to those ideas. For more information about using Enterprise Mentor with Social Media platforms, watch our presentation at www.enterpriseleaders.com.

Throughout Amroze Technology, other mentor groups are springing up as line-managers lead their teams through the Enterprise Mentor programme generating literally thousands of new business growth ideas which are captured in a central social media platform.

The results which Amroze Technology have seen from implementing Enterprise Mentoring have been transformational. Employees have become more energised, engaged,  motivated and creative. Customers now get a much greater experience, as every employee in the company, whether they are customer facing or not have become more attentive, and take more ownership and responsibility for making customers want to repeat buy and recommend Amroze. Employees have become more creative too, as they have identified literally thousands of new business growth, cost saving and product improvement ideas.

Enterprise Mentoring works where other learning interventions fail because the learning takes place in the work environment under the direction of line-managers. By putting employee development in the hands of your line-managers and giving them the tools to become better man-managers, mentors and leaders, means that the learning from the mentoring sessions gets implemented, as line-managers are fully involved in the development experience and have close responsibility for its outcome.

Enterprise Mentoring also creates a tighter bond between your employee and managers – something that doesn’t necessarily happen in traditional employee development and learning programmes. This tighter bond is created because mentors and mentees embark on their mentoring journey together, and mentors get to know more about the teams they manage. Mentees also get to learn more about their mentor – and they start to see business through their eyes.

One of the other key benefits of Enterprise Mentoring is from a financial perspective. Enterprise Mentoring delivers a greater return on your payroll expense. In a company with around 100 employees, it’s quite likely that your payroll expense could well be in the region of £3m per year or more, but by getting your line-managers to take a lead in your mentoring employees, you can get significantly higher levels of productivity and performance from your workforce, for a tiny extra financial investment in your people.

To learn more about Enterprise Mentor and what it can do for your business, why not join us at one of our workshops or visit us online at www.enterpriseleaders.com.

Category : Blog

Comments are closed.

About Us

Learn more about the creators of Enterprise MENTOR

Read More