Leadership and Organisational Strategy and Concept of Mentoring - Essay Example

? Mentoring Self-Reflective Report BY YOU YOUR SCHOOL INFO HERE HERE Mentoring self-reflective report Mentoring of the mentee, Anastasia Vaniakina, consisted of one hour sessions which took place for one hour, every Wednesday, for a period of 10 weeks. The objectives of the mentoring program were to increase the communications skills of the mentee in preparation for the job interview, assist in developing knowledge regarding contemporary negotiation skills, increase mentee awareness of factors influencing the commercial marketplace, improve team-working skills, and conduct appropriate research into the current job market in the mentee’s preferred professional field. The mentoring programs were structured utilising several different theories associated with increasing learning engagement with the mentor. To improve experiential learning, role playing was utilised, which is known to increase interest in the material being taught and discussed and improves comprehension for the learner (Poorman 2002). The mentor believed that this element of experiential learning would assist the mentee in understanding how to communicate and respond during the important interview process. It was also believed, initially, that role playing would increase the willingness to engage and communicate with the mentor successfully. The mentoring program was also structured to include elements of transformational leadership, whereby the mentor leader utilises inspirational attitudes, role models desired behaviours, and impart a specific vision or mission to give the mentee a specific focus and goal (Fairholm 2009). The goal was to improve the mentee’s interest in strategic thinking to achieve long-term gains, however literature on leadership suggests that in order to motivate and encourage, change must be negotiated between two different parties (Grieves 2010). This is why there was significant emphasis on utilising contemporary leadership theory to better enthuse the mentee and make them intrinsically focused on achieving the mentoring program objectives. Increasing communications skills of the mentee was very successful and it is attributed to utilising the role playing exercises. The first method of improving communications was to remove noise that complicated receipt of positive feedback for the mentor. Noise is any specific factor that prevents a message from getting through to the receiver (Mullins 2010). During the first and second mentoring sessions, the mentor discovered that the mentee was quite reserved and her uneasy and anxious emotional state was preventing the message from being received properly, thereby serving as negative noise. By engaging the mentee through role playing, it seemed to establish a sense of trust that reduced anxiety and allowed the mentee to provide feedback illustrating that the concepts being taught and discussed were understood and could be applied practically to real-world business scenarios. The mentor realised, also, that the mentee maintained many unrealistic perceptual filters that were serving to complicate the communications process. The mentee maintained many assumptions and expectations about the commercial environment, noticeable in the first three sessions. The mentee believed that job qualifications were not as important a how the job seeker presented themselves and communicated in order to find a job position. There seemed to be a culturally-developed set of beliefs, though not realistic, that the mentee could find employment without the necessary and listed credentials on job descriptions simply by creating an outstanding cover letter along with the CV submission. These perceptual filters were serving as noise and created moderate resistance to change when the mentor attempted to reinforce the absolute importance of having the proper credentials to achieve landing a position with a desired company. To overcome this element of noise, the mentor found many different research articles showing that it was absolutely critical to gain employability and educational skills to find a job in the mentee’s appropriate field. This seemed to reinforce that the real-world business environment is not based on the types of assumptions and expectations of the mentee, giving the mentee more enthusiasm and dedication toward creating an excellent CV and finding realistic job opening data that was directly aligned with existing skills and academic background. Team-working and negotiation was very successful and the mentee responded positively to these lessons. The mentor realised rather quickly that the mentee learned best as a kinaesthetic learner, one that must be interactively engaged in the learning material (Stafford and Dunn 1993). Interactive learning actually served to improve the cultivation process of the mentoring relationship whereby the mentee realised they could cognitively relate to the teaching skills of the mentor and assisted the mentee in understanding the genuine value of our mentoring relationship. This established the foundation of trust and respect for the strategies the mentor had chosen to make learning more interesting and comprehensible. Self-reflectively, the mentor was quite satisfied with the program’s ability to achieve its objectives and, ultimately, provide the foundation for the mentee being able to land a desirable job position. Referencing Kolb’s four stage model of reflection, the mentor’s awareness was quite high both of the self and the mentee. Through experience, the mentor learned important cues about personality, behaviour and the variety of assumptions held by the mentee that were complicating the mentoring and learning processes. The feedback and body language stemming from the mentee served as primary cues that assisted the mentor in adapting strategies that would remove some of the confused expectations about the commercial environment. This allowed the mentor to develop a variety of hypotheses about how to better improve the learning process in a way that would be considered relevant and interesting to the mentee. The application stage of the self-reflective process involved utilising more hard research data to really drive specific points to the mentee, offering concrete evidence that her assumptions and suppositions were very distorted and would not serve to improve objective achievement. Hence, it was a blend of concrete experiences, observations and reflections that provided the mentee with a set of program teachings that would produce more positive mentoring outcomes and assist the mentee in reaching the ultimate goal of landing a quality job position. The mentor was able to test various implications built on the formation of different learning concepts derived from experience with the mentee, introducing new strategies in a variety of new learning scenarios. At a personal level, the mentor realised that she maintained a knack for recognising certain socio-psychological characteristics of others and develop a variety of strategies to improve relationship development and fulfil the emotional needs of other individuals. This was never, until the mentoring program, something that the mentor had considered as being a quality strength. Through the utilisation of active listening strategies, through verbal and paralinguistic actions, the mentor was able to illustrate to the mentee that she was empathetic to the mentee’s position, legitimately concerned about achieving positive program outcomes, and would sympathise with the various frustrations felt by the mentee about entering the commercial job environment. The mentor began to understand the powerful impact of utilising appropriate communications strategies to gain respect, trust and reciprocal relationship development whereby both parties seek to find win-win scenarios in all communications engagement. Progress was achieved by establishing a personal development action plan that highlighted all of the steps, in order, that would be required for the mentee to be competent when applying and interviewing for various job openings. The mentor let the mentee know, right from the beginning, what each mentoring session would consist of to avoid confusion and allow the mentee to believe that they were valued and esteemed, something that occurs when transparent communications channels are opened. There is a theory in education known as constraint theory, stating that when learners find information to be irrelevant, they utilise cognitive biases to filter out what is being taught and will not encode it properly to memory (Desforges and Lings 1998). When engaging with the mentee, noticeable mostly after the fifth session, the mentor realised that the mentee maintained many different biases about the business environment and working cooperatively in teams which provided opportunities to adjust learning strategies for more effective outcomes and interest. The biases associated with mentee cognitive restraint were complicating achieving comprehension and understanding as the mentee attempted to block out what was being discussed since it went against the values and beliefs of the learner. The 10 week experience with the mentee assisted in building the mentor’s own personal development plan. Through self-reflection about my own abilities and strengths, I have decided to consult with more research literature in sociology and psychology due to my newly-discovered competencies in understanding human behaviour. This will assist in developing and improving my ability to teach team-working, negotiation, and improving workplace social belonging. This will occur over the next six to 12 months. The mentor has also decided to improve my academic competence in business management by interviewing a small sample of diverse professionals to gain knowledge about the relevance of applying theory to actual managerial practice. I realised through this mentoring experience that theory versus practice are often at odds with one another and by conducting this small-scale research study, it will help me to gain new perspectives on how to be a flexible educator and leader in a commercial context. This will be highly valuable for becoming a business coach and assisting others in developing their strengths. References Desforges, C. and Lings, P. (1998). Teaching knowledge application: advances in theoretical conceptions and their professional implications, British Journal of Educational Studies, 46, pp.386-398. Fairholm, M. (2009). Leadership and organisational strategy, The Public Sector Innovation Journal, 14(1), pp.26-27. Grieves, J. (2010). Organisational change: themes and issues. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mullins, L.J. (2010). Management and organisational behaviour, 9th edn. Financial Times: Prentice Hall. Poorman, P.B. (2002). Biography and role playing: fostering empathy in abnormal psychology, Teaching of Psychology, 29(1), pp.32-36. Stafford, R. and Dunn, K.J. (1993). Teaching secondary students through their individual learning styles. Allyn and Bacon. Read More