Mentoring for success – Turning L&D cost into commercial investment

Much of my work as an executive coach involves helping people wrestle with decisions. Some of these decisions feel particularly consuming because they are taken in isolation, or because people are afraid of failure and unwilling to take calculated risks. It is at times like this when I emphasise that it is just as important to make your decision right, as it is to make the right decision.

Putting energy and effort into maximising the success of a chosen route is every bit as fundamental as the decision itself and having a mentor or coach to point this out can take some of the burden out of indecision and expedite action.

At Kaplan we believe that mentoring holds the key to successful L&D programmes. We use senior leaders within companies as advocates for programmes and then ask them to mentor individuals for a year after our training to embed what has been taught.

This high-level involvement adds credibility to the programmes and also enriches the development process as these senior leaders integrate their experience and values with the material, helping to make it relevant and consistent with the corporate culture. The structured mentoring strategies that we have started in organisations complement our leadership courses and cultivate an environment of learning engagement that is so often missing from cookie-cutter soft skills training.

When we face the challenge of proving ROI on training and development we find that the data lies within the mentoring process

It is hard to imagine a more integrated and beneficial developmental tool and it is how we are able to turn our training costs into a provable investment.