Our mentoring partnerships are typically delivered over eight days or 56 hours of elapsed time across a year. Your mentor will focus on understanding your opportunities, ambitions, experience, and context at the start of the relationship so that conversations can be grounded in your reality and explore highly focused and relevant actions. The partnership then develops across a series of regular face-to-face meetings. These establish a deep bond of trust and give you the time and space to address thorny issues in depth. Mentors and mentees also typically keep in touch between meetings and further ad hoc conversations take place on request.
Whilst all partnerships start with the same process of discovery about you and your trust, the agenda for each mentoring partnership will be different for each CEO and led by them. Meetings are scheduled and prepared for to maximise value, and mentoring conversations will be goal-oriented and informed by established models and frameworks. In their work with you, your mentor will help you to turn your burning issues into a strategy for your trust and help to strengthen your leadership as you enact it.
A sample meeting structure is outlined below. In practice, yours may follow a different shape, by agreement with your mentor.
|
Duration |
Activity |
|
1 day |
Mentor preparation: Reading A day of reading for the mentor to understand the context of the trust. A set of core documents and key data will be requested, and you may also add other specific items that you want your mentor to be sighted on. |
|
1 day |
Mentor preparation: School visits Your mentor will visit at least two schools in the trust to see and understand the context of its work and meet key staff. This may include (according to your needs and preferences) meetings with the Chair and/or members of the Executive Team and Chair. |
|
0.5 day |
Establishing the partnership A half-day meeting to discuss your leadership story, current and future needs, goals and set the objectives for your collaboration across the year. |
|
5.5 days |
The meeting frequency and agendas for the partnership are set by you to suit your needs. A good starting point is to agree a half-termly half day meeting to maintain momentum and allow time for action to take place between conversations. The remaining 2.5 days could then be used to schedule longer visits or more regular catch-ups. |
The relationship between mentor and mentee is clearly defined, professional and strategic. It’s underpinned by a mentoring agreement that sets out the expectations of each party and is characterised by open and honest exchange. The partnership, and any work created within it, is also highly confidential. Your mentor will not provide any feedback to your trust or contribute to the executive performance review process.
Mentoring partnerships are established for a year to give you time to formulate strategies and put them into action. We recognise that this may be the right duration for some and not long enough for others, particularly those managing mergers and growth. In the third term of each partnership, you will review progress towards your goals with your mentor and discuss whether there is value in extending the partnership. We are careful to avoid building-in dependency, but equally want to ensure that the progress made over the course of the partnership becomes embedded and sustainable for the long term.
Creating mentoring partnerships begins with a conversation with CST to discuss the service and how it might meet your needs and expectations. If you’d like to explore further, we arrange a conversation with a mentor whose values and experience are potentially a good fit with yours. Some mentees like to work with someone who has local knowledge, others deliberately opt for someone completely independent of their locale. The choice is yours. This is an open, no-obligation conversation to explore fit and chemistry. If desired, several conversations can take place, each with a different mentor, before you make your decision.
The first year’s fee is £7,200+VAT for CST members, and £7,950+VAT for non members, plus travel expenses.
The subsequent year’s fee is by agreement, reflecting the duration and frequency of your mentoring meetings.
Drop us a line at mentoring@cstuk.org.uk to explore how a mentoring partnership could work for you.
Company no: 05303883
Charity no: 1107640
