Hmmm. I agree with Fanatic's comments, but curious as to why you're getting "pressure". Is there a deeper issue? Is this coming from the CEO? Or is someone selling a mentor course who's the brother-in-law of a board member? Perhaps the mentorship pressure is a symptom of a deeper problem.

The issue isn't the CEO, it's the people directly under the CEO who do not want her to see any staff development without mentoring attached. The CEO herself, if presented with a well-reasoned training design, is always quite reasonable.

This project is one of those mandates that our group can't refuse or substantially modify. In a perfect world, I would be able to explain that "shared vocabulary" is not an effective training goal, and in fact that was my first response. Given the subject matter, my first proposition was an online resource, as Fanatic described. However, the leadership of the organization is looking to impress an outside body, so they want to do something flashy, and in our organization mentoring is flashy at the moment.

Going into the classroom or even online to learn definitions and 22 concepts seems like something everyone will immediately forget or remember only a small percentage. I'd look at how you embed those definitions and concepts into everyone's work. Mentoring in and of itself isn't the question rather what do you intend to do with the mentoring and how will youi training the mentors.

quote:

they want to do something flashy, and in our organization mentoring is flashy at the moment.

The reason org change failure rates are so high. Research of 1,000 CEO's annually find this is why they prefer ancient or scientically-validated methods versus fashion trends. If you like I can email you an article that got a lot of press this year that might help. (tried attaching here but failed - forum only accepts graphics or text files)

Looks like you're stuck with mentoring. Maybe you can include some values-based work.

Sorry I don't have any other helpful ideas.

Thanks for the validation! I would love to see the article and will email you directly.

I agree - in my experience, the projects that fail are those where a methodology is selected for reasons that have nothing to do with the results of the needs analysis. I am still hopeful that I can design a course that will meet all the needs, including "something flashy," without having to shoehorn the flavor-of-the-month in.