083 – Reflections on the Mentoring Scheme

[00:00:00] Lucie: Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS Podcast. My name’s Lucie Hazelgrove Planel, I’m a Social Impact Scientist and anthropologist, and I’m here today with David Stern, one of the founding directors of IDEMS. Hi David.

[00:00:17] David: Hi Lucie, we’re going to discuss your mentoring program today, is that right?

[00:00:23] Lucie: It’s not mine, firstly, but I would like to discuss the mentoring program, which is, I think we’re two years in or perhaps even starting the third year. Yeah, it’s gonna be round five that we start soon and we’re in a phase of reflection with my two other mentoring reps. So I think it’s a nice time to reflect also with you about what’s happened and where it might go or how it might continue.

[00:00:50] David: We should start also with where it came from, because the reason I said, jokingly, it’s your program, is that you inherited this, and actually, if you hadn’t stepped into this, it’s not quite clear to me what would have happened. And you’ve made it into something which I find very interesting, but I deliberately stayed out of, broadly.

I’ve been involved in a few discussions with you, but almost no one else about the mentoring programme, which is great. And so I’m looking forward to maybe you saying a little bit about where this came from for you, some of the background, I know there was some background reading you had on it before it started as well.

[00:01:31] Lucie: Yeah. The mentoring scheme came out of one of the IDEMS colleagues who had identified a need for coaching within some of their INNODEMS colleagues. So some of the sort of basic office skills, I think it was, and then just seeing that perhaps within INNODEMS, they didn’t have enough time to reflect and talk about their own personal development, which I think in UK and European contexts, we are more keen on doing or have a tendency to spend more time doing.

And then yeah, that colleague was leaving. She had the idea to expand it to both the IDEMS team and the INNODEMS team more widely and to develop it into a mentoring program. And then as she was leaving I was also brought in or invited to participate, which I’m always interested in capacity building. And I guess that’s yeah, the human interactions and how to how to support people in different ways.

[00:02:26] David: Let me just step back into this for a second. It was Margherita Philipp, who was with us, and she was very interested in some of these ideas that were coming out, I think it was very much from the feminist mentoring circles. I’m trying to remember what the actual, there was a very specific text that she was very interested in. And we’ll maybe come to this or maybe you can put this in the chat afterwards. But, it was really about getting beyond North South ideas of feminism, and so on, I think it did come out of India, where she’d been exposed to this very interesting peer mentoring scheme.

And she was saying that, this is the sort of thing she could see being valuable within IDEMS and for IDEMS to get involved in. And I said, I’d be delighted, but I didn’t feel that I should be the one driving this. And so somebody would need to drive it. And she was interested in getting started, but needed to hand it over because she was going off to her further studies and she was stepping back.

And when you stepped in, I think the impetus on it was actually, at least at the beginning, this served a really important role not just with the INNODEMS colleagues, which you mentioned, but just within the IDEMS team itself. Bits of the feedback I’ve had about the sort of peer to peer mentoring within the IDEMS colleagues at the beginning was so central.

I think that some of these areas which have emerged, almost that evolution, we shouldn’t forget what happened when it started. Because I think that was extremely powerful, and I think there’s relationships within IDEMS which were formed by those early mentorship relationships.

[00:04:14] Lucie: That’s an interesting question. I don’t know. I don’t know.

[00:04:19] David: I’m aware of at least a few amongst colleagues where they have referred to me back to the fact that actually they had a sort of mentorship role in different ways, which then actually led to a personal engagement, which has been ongoing.

[00:04:35] Lucie: Okay good. I’m glad to hear that. But I wasn’t going to mention the manuals or the sort of ideas because because we’ve struggled with them. We’ve struggled in them in the sense that a lot of our colleagues have pushed back against them. The books that we’ve been using, or the source materials, is called Feminist Mentoring for Feminist Futures.

And, yeah, they’re interesting and they clearly lay out both the sort of theory behind it and give examples of how it’s been put into practice, and ideas how to be a good mentor. And it’s very much feminism in the supporting anyone and everyone sense, as opposed to, as I think some of our colleagues understood it, supporting women. That’s my understanding of the term. So that has always been feedback from whenever we have referred to those manuals.

[00:05:22] David: And that’s interesting in its own right, especially in this sort of context where a number of our colleagues involved in these programs are from Kenya and from Ghana, feminism has a very different connotation as a term, where, as you say, I can absolutely understand how culturally some of these things are not received in the same way as they would be.

[00:05:45] Lucie: It was also from the IDEMS team.

[00:05:47] David: It was also from the IDEMS team?

[00:05:48] Lucie: It was also from the IDEMS team. Yep.

[00:05:51] David: That’s interesting.

[00:05:52] Lucie: Yeah. Anyway, so the scheme started with just INNODEMS and IDEMS.

[00:05:57] David: Yeah.

[00:05:58] Lucie: And that first session or round, which lasts about six months, where we have pairings between two individuals. We had, I can’t remember how many people involved, but we had a high proportion of the staff in the two organisations involved, even including the director of INNODEMS as a mentor to someone. Which was great, really great.

As the rounds have evolved, we then included the GHAIDEMS team in Ghana. They also wanted to be involved. That’s I think last year now, they’ve been involved for two rounds, which has been fantastic too. And has enabled more not just Europe and Kenya, but also then now Ghanaian colleagues getting involved, and we’ve been able to create more relationships between Kenya and Ghana, the colleagues between those two organisations. It’s made a nice triangle, I think.

[00:06:45] David: But this has also included people from Niger, Burkina Faso, Benin.

[00:06:50] Lucie: Yes, absolutely, I shouldn’t have forgotten them. No, and they have participated, I think, in each round which is really great.

Now we’ve started to see, though, that we’ve started to see recently that, no, firstly, I should say that at the end of the first round, we received loads of feedback, people were telling us, yeah, what they had learned or what they were getting out of the scheme. And as we got to round two, round three, and now round four that finished it’s been a lot harder to get any feedback from people.

We’ve also noticed the number of participants dropping. So me with the mentoring reps for INNODEMS and GHAIDEMS, we’ve been discussing this and thinking about what are the causes and what we can do differently to better serve the mentoring needs and personal or professional development of our colleagues.

So there’s been, there’s two ideas at the moment. And this we saw even in the first round of seeing can the mentoring scheme be also a part of the induction process of new interns in the recent case for GHAIDEMS, or of new colleagues in general, which IDEMS already has a buddy scheme for new colleagues though, so should the two be joined together and more formally explained as a induction process.

But then also, one of the other mentoring reps said that there’s perhaps a misunderstanding that it’s more of a tick box exercise, and once you’ve done the mentoring scheme, you’ve done it. It’s like a course, like a normal course that people follow. It’s something that you do once and then that’s done. Which is perhaps more on our communication side of how we explain what the scheme is and what it can do for you, or perhaps it’s that people have done the scheme and haven’t found it useful enough to do it again, or to participate in again.

[00:08:37] David: One of the things I’m aware of is that for a number of people it is just, there’s people who would like to be involved but don’t feel that they can really devote the time needed to make it worthwhile, is part of it as well.

[00:08:54] Lucie: Absolutely yeah because it does take, you have to remember what’s going on between sessions and you have to actually, yeah, reflect on what’s going on, whether you’re a mentee or a mentor, you have to think about the other person and have the time. Yeah, which is not something that we can necessarily solve so easily.

[00:09:15] David: No, exactly. And this is something where I am certainly aware of a number of people who would love to be more involved, but don’t feel that they can afford to with their current work pressures. And that sort of is a challenge for us as an organisation, that this is not really where we want people to be, we want people to be able to have the time to engage in this.

And so I do see some of those as broader problems that we have as an organisation. People don’t feel they have the time for these sorts of things. And so I think there’s, yeah, interesting questions around that.

[00:09:48] Lucie: And I’ve missed out in the stage of the sort of development of the mentoring scheme, that initially it was more of a sort of traditional, more experienced people mentoring less experienced people in terms of career wise, experience and career.

[00:10:01] David: I remember in the first round.

[00:10:03] Lucie: No, that is true. Okay.

[00:10:04] David: No, that was not there in the first round. In the first round, we had some wonderful examples where we had some very experienced people being mentored by… In fact, if I’m not mistaken, I seem to remember you being a mentor.

[00:10:18] Lucie: Yeah, exactly. I forgot that one.

[00:10:22] David: And there were a few others. And the fact you put yourself forward to do that was so important because, actually, as being somebody who’s saying this is something which can be done you needed to know that it could be done. And so I think that was really important the way you put yourself forward for that and volunteered to put yourself in that interesting position.

[00:10:42] Lucie: But academically, in a way, I was more experienced than my colleague in that field, I would say.

[00:10:50] David: Yeah, so you had an area where you were bringing your academic experience to bear. So you’re right, yeah.

[00:10:59] Lucie: I don’t know. Anyway, in some of the later rounds, we made it more explicit that we would be interested in understanding experience in different ways. Or having a wider understanding of what people might be interested in being mentored on. Which is, I think actually one of our difficulties in the scheme that a lot of people aren’t really aware of what mentorship they would like.

[00:11:22] David: Yeah.

[00:11:23] Lucie: Which is really interesting. So one of our questions in the workshops that we run with the mentees and mentors is how do you encourage self awareness and reflexivity in terms of your own development. Do you have a quick answer?

[00:11:36] David: Absolutely not! These are really hard things. And I think to me, one of the things that I really value is that this is something that as an organisation, not only are we struggling through it, but it is something where the ownership for struggling through it is lying outside of the, if you want, the formal power structures.

And I think that’s been so important in different ways. And, it’s something where I’m interested and conscious that I didn’t want to be, I didn’t want to be a mentor to start with, because I didn’t want that to be seen to be what this was about. And I’m really pleased with how this has evolved and is evolving thoughtfully.

I don’t feel that it’s about it being anything specific and I think where I feel you’ve been really good is just trying to make it useful. That’s what this is about. If it’s useful for people, then it is of value.

[00:12:48] Lucie: Yep.

[00:12:48] David: And it’s not aimed at achieving something very specific. And I think that was always a very important intention in how this was conceived.

[00:12:59] Lucie: That’s been something that’s been difficult to communicate with people who aren’t really sure, who think mentoring sounds interesting, but they’re not really sure about what they would like to receive mentorship on, or how mentoring might differ to coaching, or how it might differ to I guess technical skills development type support, which we’ve tried to be clear that the mentorship scheme is not to learn new technical skills.

[00:13:23] David: There are other routes to try to do that. And I think one of the things which is important as well is that, you know, in many other contexts, mentorship is often seen as how to take people who are junior in a particular career pathway along an established career route. And that as well is not what we’re trying to do because almost always the mentorship is happening across cultural contexts.

[00:13:51] Lucie: Which makes it really difficult though.

[00:13:53] David: Yeah, absolutely. But that’s also part of its value, and this is why it’s such an interesting scheme.

[00:14:00] Lucie: Yeah, yes. So often some of the biggest problems that people have said that they have had is literally just trying to arrange a meeting with their colleague because we have different ways of working in the different regions of the world. And yeah, so it’s being aware of that and discovering it and then trying to find a way that will work for the two people involved.

So with the other mentoring reps, we’re in a phase of reflection, as I said I’ll keep you posted on what happens, on the outcome of that.

[00:14:29] David: Yeah. And I’m just so delighted that, you, as a collective you, have managed to keep this moving forward, to keep reflecting on it. I think there’s potentially a moment of broader reflection that would be valuable. If so, we should try and find ways to arrange that. And I do think that the person who, of course, I know you’ve been discussing bits with Kate, who is of course our new IDEMS director. This is the sort of thing where her background, of course will also be of value in thinking about this and the role that this could play going forward. And she might be interested in something which would take a different direction.

The one thing that I would sort of say slightly is that, it’s okay to keep things different. So as part of an induction process, people having a scheme which is formal and related to that and a one off while you’re getting introduced. I feel is inherently different from the nature of the scheme you’ve got. Now, that doesn’t mean that they can’t learn from one another and they shouldn’t take learnings or have integrations.

But I would argue that there is real value in keeping at least a… articulated difference between something which is part of an onboarding process and an ongoing mentorship, which is really about lifelong learning and particularly this cross cultural engagement, which I hope will be valued.

I would argue one of the things which has made it difficult in recent times is the fact that IDEMS’ growth has slowed down. And so the pool of people in INNODEMS and GHAIDEMS has grown faster than the pool of people in IDEMS. And that’s led to strains in terms of those interactions.

[00:16:25] Lucie: Exactly. Yeah.

[00:16:26] David: Which I think are part of the sort of difficulty of people actually thinking, can I afford to put the time into this? So I just think that’s sort of something to be aware of and not to see that as being negative, but recognizing these things will evolve and they will always evolve as the different organisations involved.

[00:16:46] Lucie: Yeah, absolutely. And also, people don’t need to participate in every round. So it’s quite normal that if lots of people participated in the first round, then they would want a little bit of a break before coming back or something.

[00:16:59] David: Yep.

[00:17:00] Lucie: Great. Thank you for your ideas, David. We’re definitely going to keep the mentoring scheme going, in its current form as well as perhaps adding different aspects. Yeah.

[00:17:08] David: Yeah I’m really appreciative of the effort that’s gone into this, the thought, the reflection, and the fact that I’m a little bit kept in the loop without actually interfering as I hope. So I appreciate hearing about how it’s going. And maybe contribute at times. And, at this point it might be appropriate that there might be contexts where it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to be a mentor or maybe even a mentee. And that’s something where maybe this is something we can discuss as we go forward.

I look forward to actually maybe being able to engage in this more in the future as I feel it is now established and I’m independent enough from it. It’s established independently for me enough. So, yeah, I look forward to engaging and thank you again for your efforts on this. It’s been a really enriching part of the organisation.

[00:17:58] Lucie: Good, great and I agree. It’s been fun. Thank you then and speak to you soon.

[00:18:05] David: Cheers.