Mentoring
The Problem
Our creative industries - particularly technology-driven sectors such as games or digital media & marketing - are in boom. Startups are countless, we're hiring like crazy, promoting up quickly and sucking people in from parallel industries as fast as we can.
Whilst this growth is great news for business it does result in an unprecedented challenge for the newer people in our teams. How do they quickly get up to speed with the industry, work out how their skills are transferrable, overcome and feel confident and organised in thier role?
As a result terms like "impostor syndrome" have become common parlance and our workplaces increasingly have put support in for the stress, anxiety and burnout issues that can result. Instead of post-fixing these issues we need to support these people better in the first place.
The Solution
This is where coaching and mentoring comes into its own. Just like a sports coach, a great business coach or mentor helps their clients to achieve their maximum potential much more quickly than they could alone and - importantly - helps them to avoid injury in the process.
Coaching can be useful for anyone in your team but we find that the majority of our clients tend to be either:
The founders and leaders of very small teams looking to achieve thier next stage of growth.
Mid/senior team members within larger businesses who need to fast-track thier development due to a change of industry or rapid promotion.
We'll work with you to develop your skills in areas like: leadership, management, negotiation, dealing with conflict, processes, problem solving, product design, creative thinking, building confidence, time management, prioritisation and presentation in order to fast track your career while ensuring you maintain a healthy work/life balance.
How it Works
The key to setting up any great working relationship is to ensure you get the foundations right. We do this by investing our time in two calls or meetings:
An informal introductory meeting which gives both the coach/mentor and the recipient the chance to check that the relationship is a good match.
A focussed planning session which sets out the key goals for the next few months of work.
Once a plan is set and agreed regular sessions are scheduled, normally monthly, as a call or a meeting at a mutually convenient location. These meetings are kept sharply focussed on the tasks at hand whether those be goals set from a previous meeting or challenges that have surfaced since and at the end of the meeting a set of achieveable goals will be agreed for completion by the next meeting.
We don't leave you hanging between meetings though, we'll be at the end of a phone or email to help you deal with any ad hoc issues between sessions and we won't charge you a penny more for that - it's all included in the bespoke package we've agreed with you.
What Makes a Great Coach
In business the challenges that people face are rarely new, it's the person facing them that changes. So, in order to coach effectively, you need both extensive experience of solving real world business problems and the ability to be a strongly empathic with the people you're working with.
It's also importand to understand that effective coaching, mentoring or even non-execing is rarely about teaching, most of the time it's about:
Taking the time to get to know the person you're working with and understanding thier motivations, strengths, weaknesses, stresses and strains.
Helping them to properly understand the challenge they're facing and work out the path to their own personal solution.
And, importantly, sharing the skills and techniques used to achieve that in order that your client can use them autonymously and with their own team in future. We refer to this as "showing behind the curtain".
At Kempt & Co all of our team are self starters who have extensive experience of leading, managing and developing their own teams and are able to use that experience to deliver advice, guidance and support in a bespoke and personal manner.