Module 1: Pre-Module Tasks (1) LMA Article- Personal reflections LMA Mentor Training- Mentoring in a Football Context Introduction The function of mentoring has long been established across a wide range of industry and business settings. In the modern day sporting world this has become an increasingly used support function to maximise learning and performance for players, coaches, managers, chief executives and indeed, business owners. Mentoring works because it creates a safe place for people to feel both supported and challenged, increases their self-confidence, confirms and clarifies their immediate issues and required actions and most importantly creates an environment which enables growth, development and learning to take place. The focus on learning helps people to become better decision makers, helps them to listen and hear more clearly and helps them to commit to clear and achievable outcomes. Q1. When looking to others for support and advice, it’s tempting to look just to your immediate circle of peers or confidants. Do you think that’s sensible or is there a risk we will simply hear what we want to hear? Is there more to be gained in casting the net wider? It is clear that effective mentoring is a careful and skilful balance between support and challenge. Individuals need to feel supported but also need to be challenged with accurate and honest feedback, new perspectives and different ways of thinking. It is sensible to have some mentors that are part of your immediate environment as they may know you very well and can detect small behavioural changes or personal preferences. However, it has become increasingly common to create a wider support network and develop multiple mentors that can operate in slightly different domains and specialisms. Most top executives have a range of people that support them in a number of different ways. Sport is also moving to a position where multiple mentors are now very common. This provides for constant challenge and support across the range of performance enhancement functions. The top people employ the best people they can and expect to be challenged on a daily basis. Yes, it is about receiving good advice and support but it is also about listening and hearing to the feedback that is sometimes difficult to receive. Q2. We think of mentors as being managers who are older and wiser than us, but is there value also in reaching out to our peers, younger professionals and, equally, others outside of the industry? The function of mentoring is to help people learn and make good decisions. When we are early in our different careers, it is often that this support comes from older and more experienced people. However, this is not the only mechanism or provider of good learning. Most of our learning comes from our peers, comes from observing and discussion, comes from listening and questioning. It is obvious that we can learn from a range of people across a wide range of settings. As professionals become a little older, a key skill is to create environments where we can learn from lots of different places and different people. Peer mentoring and reverse mentoring allows people of all ages and backgrounds to help each other grow and develop. The mentors and mentees can grow together in different ways. The modern world surrounds us with vast amounts of information, we need a range of people to help us make sense of this new information and link it to our professional work environments. However, whilst we can potentially learn from many different people and environments, remember that we must make sense of this information and bring it back to our own context. Whilst learning from outside our industry or outside our sport can be invaluable, the new ideas and principles may also not always fit with our context and our specific sport settings.
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