Our Leadership Mentoring Programme

We expect Fellows in the Network will have already benefited from mentoring support across their research and innovation life cycle to date. You may already have a mentor in your host institution or indeed have formal and informal mentors who have supported you in developing your career from an early stage. The Network’s mentor will complement such support, extending your networks as you develop and begin to consider your career progression and transitions.

Mentoring and coaching are ‘sister disciplines’ and support personal development in different ways, complementing each other in their practice.

Mentoring:

• matches you to a mentor who has experience that is relevant to your needs
• offers advice, guidance, and experience with conversational coaching
• supports your priorities and aspirations, and works with your experiences, preferences and values over a six-month period
• is offered via a suite of options taking place throughout the year (Leadership Mentoring, Coffee Connect, Peer Perspectives).

Coaching:

• can be requested as and when you need it and you would value time and space to explore
• takes place with certified professional coaches who are trained to utilise coaching tools and models to help you to reframe your challenges
• does not provide you with advice, but will support you to explore and clarify your challenges and opportunities, identify your strengths and abilities and find your own way forward
• is targeted, problem solving/‘task and finish’ meetings of one or two sessions
• is offered via One-to-one Coaching programme.

UKRI is keen to ensure that all Fellows can review and develop their mentoring networks so the mentor we pair you with would offer something new, rather than replace a trusted mentor you are working with. However, we do not wish to disrupt how well your current mentoring partnership is working for you. Please let us know if you already have a good mentor by emailing us at mentoring@flfdevnet.com.

Mentoring can offer you valuable learning opportunities at all stages of your career. A targeted mentoring conversation can offer you time out of your day-to-day working patterns, to help you clarify your thoughts. So, whether the salient issues for you are resolving snags during your transition to a new role or responsibility, seeking your next career move, picking up a new skillset, or finding support for navigating processes and relationships at work, or something else entirely, a mentor can help you take regular time out to think, and plan.

A unique feature of the Leadership Mentoring Programme is our bespoke matching process. Matching each mentee based on their individual objectives and wish list allows us to find the right mentor for you. An experienced matching team work on your behalf to get the best match for every mentee, recruiting in new mentors to meet requests. We also make introductions for you, to help you get off to a good start. To inform this process, mentees and mentors are all invited to express their preferences and we use these to source the right mentor for you. If we don’t get it right, let us know, and we can always refine our choice. In the interests of confidentiality, we don’t publish lists of our mentors.

Absolutely, and we can facilitate this for you. Our mentoring strategy offers a range of ways to engage with Leadership Mentors and Peer Mentors. Take a look at our online learning resource ‘Choosing, recruiting and working with a mentor’ for support with arranging your own mentors.

Following your attendance at the Welcome Workshop, and on completion of your matching preferences, you can expect to be partnered with a Leadership Mentor for a six-month period. We anticipate a minimum of three meetings in this time, but this will depend on the relationship that you build. Meetings are booked to suit you, and you are free to choose when and how you meet. At the end of the six-month period, you choose whether you stay paired, wrap up the partnership, or apply to be re-matched with a new mentor.

The Welcome Workshop provides you with guidance on articulating and thinking through what you want from your mentor. Going into mentoring having done this thinking will help you make the most of it.

As a mentee you will set the direction and agenda for the mentoring discussions. The programme offers you a Mentoring Agreement template to help pairs discuss relevant approaches and agree direction and objectives for the mentoring sessions. Whatever skills or experiences your mentor brings to the partnership, they should keep the focus on the needs and wishes of you as the mentee.

After each meeting you can decide for yourself how to proceed, and the right way to do that for you. It’s your role as the mentee to then follow up and help your mentor shape the support they offer you, by giving them some feedback.

• All coaches and mentors have a duty to understand the relationship between the coach, client and the sponsors (Future Leaders Fellows Development Network). Advisors, coaches, and mentors must attend any relevant orientation sessions to ensure the intentions and scope of the Network, as well as the relevant programme’s objectives, are understood.
• Our website sets out the Network’s aims and objectives, according to our contract from UKRI, and our coaching and mentoring programmes are delivered in support of those aims and objectives.
• We will do our best to ensure that all coaching and mentoring delivered through the Network is accessible, high quality, and does not harm the interests of Fellows, the Network, or our stakeholders. We reserve the right to decline to offer coaching and mentoring to Fellows where we consider that doing so would raise duty of care issues.
• We adhere to the Global Code of Ethics for Coaches, Mentors and Supervisors.
• Any individual participating in our coaching and mentoring programmes must read and accept our Coaching Guidelines and/or Mentoring Guidelines, and must also attend the mentoring orientation sessions run by the Network.
• Individual coaches and mentors will share their own opinions with the Fellows, and are responsible for the opinions expressed. These opinions should not be taken as representative of the views of the Future Leaders Fellows Development Network or UKRI. No indemnity for misguidance or negligence is provided to coaches or mentors by the Network.
• Professional coaches will produce evidence of their accreditation or qualifications where required.

A six-month programme will allow you to get to know your mentor and make progress on your priority development objectives. If the partnership works well, you can stay paired after the six-month programme ends. If your priorities or preferences change, you can be matched to a new mentor instead.

If the partnership works well, you can stay paired after the six-month programme ends. We will not formally monitor or evaluate your partnership after the six-month point, but we will still support you should you need us.

Yes, you certainly can. You can request a new mentor, or an additional mentor, or engage with our range of mentoring options, to suit your needs.

The Welcome Workshop is for both mentees and mentors. This is because evidence shows that the quality of the mentoring experience is higher when we support all participants to prepare for mentoring, making sure that expectations are clear, and shared by both sides of the partnership. We cover boundaries, and what mentoring is not, as well as offering ideas for how you can work together to co-create the partnership.

Attending the same session as the mentors means that points raised by either mentors or mentees can be heard and discussed by everyone involved, creating a transparent and reassuring approach. It supports our collaborative programme ethos.

It also means that mentees get to benefit from developing a mentoring skill set. Evaluation data has demonstrated that having mentoring skills also supports mentees to become more confident leaders and research supervisors.

All members of the development network will benefit from our mentoring programme. If you have not yet been invited to join, we will offer you a priority place on the next available cohort.