Mentoring

At the end of 2013 he Library Leadership Group (LLG) visited all the campuses to talk to the staff in small interview groups about their desires for our leadership model and to describe one thing that would make their working life better. The most requested thing mentoring.

LLG took this fabulous idea to the Library Team leaders meeting and their feedback will live in my memory forever! LLG went to the meeting full of enthusiasm - YaY let's doing mentoring! We decided to go around the room to get feedback and the first speaker asked us for our definition of mentoring. We suggested a few things that had come up from our discussions with staff and the reply was 'half of that is mentoring as I see it and the other half is coaching' - from this LLG learned we needed more refined parameters.

The next person asked how would it work and how much time would team leaders be expected to incorporate into their regular workflows.

The next asked if there would be an expectation that TLs be mentors ... they were all sensible, informed questions. It was a great jumping off point for further research that was most clearly urgently required. It was also a great demonstration of the "thinking hats" procedure as, in looking back at it I can see the value particularly of the black hat in this situation.

In short there were more questions than we had answers for and I felt both embarrassed at my own naivete as I headed back to the drawing board and awed by the experienced talent in the room.