 Mentoring ProgramD’Arcy Vanderpool and Associates designs and establishes customized internal mentoring programs for organizations. The term mentor comes from the story of Mentor in Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus, king of Ithaca, prior to going to fight in the Trojan War, appointed a guardian for his young son, Telemachus. The guardian, Mentor, was actually the goddess Athena, daughter to Zeus, who disguised herself as a man for this job. The relationship was based on the idea that Telemachus would emulate Mentor to learn the skills he would need. Because Mentor served as a trusted advisor, teacher, friend, and nurturer, the term came to be associated with those qualities. The relationship between the wise Mentor and the young Telemachus is repeated in mentor-protégé relationships today. In
establishing both a mentoring culture and a formal mentoring
program, the consultants at D’Arcy Vanderpool
and Associates spend time assessing the corporate culture and
advising on the philosophy, principles, components, and functions
of the mentoring
program design. Once the initial training is complete, much effort is put into the selection of pairs for the mentoring program. The mentor and protégé agree about the skills the protégé wants to learn and experience he or she wants to gain, and together they design a realistic development plan. The protégé drives the partnership while the mentor guides and assesses. Career functions emerge in the beginning of the relationship while psychosocial functions emerge when the pair develops trust, mutuality and intimacy. Mentoring relationships are essential for developing job-related skills in managers. Protégés are like student pilots while the mentor acts as a qualified instructor. At
some point in the consulting engagement, an internal coordination
team is established to transfer the Mentor Program to function
internally. This team will learn how to customize the process
for the organization. They promote the process internally, recruit,
network, serve as matchmakers, and facilitate the mentoring orientation. More Consulting Services: |
TESTIMONIALD'Arcy and her team of coaches provided services to our agency...of approximately 115 employees... (when we merged from two agencies) for approximately 15 months... The services provided consisted of individual executive coaching for the department's management team and also included monthly training sessions for the entire group... I was certain that our employees would experience an adjustment process, which inherently comes with any major organizational culture change. Similarly, I knew that without access to, and understanding of, the tools available to our employees to effectively deal with such change, the merger would be, at worst, a disaster, and at best, the creation of a mediocre agency, ill equipped to adequately serve the public. Ms. Vanderpool and her team certainly had a daunting task placed before them... They were asked to take a group of individuals (many of whom would transition out, and others in, during the process -- not making their jobs any easier) who had little or no management training, and were coming from an under funded, understaffed, and under managed organization, and create a cohesive, innovative, respected, professional management team. No doubt adding to the challenge -- my expectations were high. D'Arcy served as my personal coach. From an individual perspective, I can say that D'Arcy served as both a sounding board (which is often difficult to access as the leader of an organization) and a prompter of thought, without providing unsolicited advice, which I both respect and appreciate. My personal experience was certainly a positive one. From a broader perspective, my expectations were met, as well. I could write volumes concerning the experiences of our team over the past year, but I will not. I will say that when I now use the word "team" to refer to our group, I use it truly in the manner with which it was intended and I also include D'Arcy and her colleagues as part of that team. It would be misleading to suggest that there have not been many challenges and hurdles along the way. If our organization, both as individuals and as a team, did not experience these challenges, I would question the need for the kind of coaching I was seeking for our management team in the first place. That said, we have grown as a management team by orders of magnitude over the past year, and I do not hesitate to suggest that that is, in part, due to the efforts of Ms. Vanderpool and her colleagues. In fact, I will be placing a contract renewal before our elected board for consideration.... Christine Robinson, Director
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