Business mentoring program central to the maturing of Ripe Cheese
Ripe’s online presence grew so fast that within three months it made up 70 per cent of Hakim and his partners’ overall operation. What suffered was bricks and mortar – over the counter sales at his market stall dropped by about 90 per cent. “The struggle we were having with the Vic Market stall affected me really badly,” Hakim says. “It knocked my confidence and self-worth to a huge extent.”
Hakim worked with business mentor, Tina Manolitsas, whose experience and dedication helped transform Hakim’s approach to his business and life on numerous levels. Through the program I came to realise I was totally focused on the shop but didn’t understand its foundation,” Hakim says. “The exercises Tina gave me not only helped us put a proper structure in place for Ripe’s growth, they helped me discover things about myself. I recognised the three purposes in my professional career right now – to be a business owner, a professional speaker and a champion of local produce.”
Building High Performance Teams
Gary (CEO) identified that Greg (General Manager) would benefit from further development of his leadership skills given his new portfolio.
Greg has received lots of training and development in the past, but this was a new team for Greg, full of very smart, very experienced and more mature individuals that frankly were quite intimidating! Gary was keen to give Greg every opportunity to professionally grow and be a success in the role and realised that more training and skills coaching was not what was needed. Gary saw that Greg needed guidance on how to apply his skills, experience, knowledge and capabilities to best effect, and even more importantly, needed the confidence to do it.
Greg is a go getting CEO who acts quickly when it comes to developing his team and ensuring the organisation is working optimally to meeting its goals. We worked together with Gary (sponsor) and Greg (mentee) to develop a plan and identify the right mentor and support team to get started and help Greg achieve what was expected in a confident and sustainable way.
Building Empathy
John (Group Divisional Manager) has 10 direct reports who each have a team to manage. Mangers work in a fast paced environment and staff work at multiple locations making it challenging for everyone to be on the same page at the same time. Wires sometimes get crossed and emotions can rise making it frustrating for everyone.
Group performance wasn’t where it needed to be and John did not understand what he was doing wrong, or not doing, for this situation to arise. All the managers were proficient, and John spent significant amounts of time one x one with each of them to tell them what was required, but there seemed to be no lasting improvement and the dysfunction was only growing.
We worked with John to identify the root causes of the problem (teamwork, empathy, communication and shared purpose) and developed a program that enabled John to understand himself and others better, and to utilise his own skills and experiences in new and different ways to better suit the peculiarities of his unique situation. By spacing the sessions out over suitable intervals, we gave John the time and space to practice what he was learning and to bring his lived experiences back to subsequent sessions so the program could be refined and tailored in real-time.
Developing Confidence with Boards
Lisa (CEO) came to us as she was new to the CEO role and she wanted to make sure she was building the best possible working relationship with her board. Lisa had done some prior research but wasn’t confident she fully understood how a board worked, what he role was in relation to the board and especially the C hair, and what she should be doing to give the Board the confidence they had made the right choice in selecting her for the CEO role.
We worked with both Lisa as CEO and the Chair to identify what was required/expected and why. From there we developed a program with Lisa that built understanding of how a board works and what dynamics within a board can drive expectations and which can sometimes create headaches for CEOs.
We helped Lisa become confident in her role and pro-active in anticipating board needs and issues. Also covered were real life experiences of board centred issues that CEOs need to deal with, so the sessions were not just theory based, but deeply grounded in practical reality. Lisa also had the opportunity to bring current issues into the sessions to workshop solutions in real-time, knowing what was discussed would stay completely confidential.
Learning to Prioritise when Time Bound
Karen (Marketing Director) works to a plan however is often expected to deliver reactive requests in unrealistic timeframes. Karen is exasperated and identified she is poorly managing her time due to the overwhelming number of tasks which lets her frustrations lead her day.
After speaking with Andrew (MD) he agreed that having a mentor would assist her and help her learn to better understand her role, better manage people’s expectations and to better prioritise what she was working on based on a deeper understanding of the company’s core objectives and the nature of office dynamics, politics and other elements of stakeholder behaviours that she was previously unaware of.
Building an Agile Culture
Digital Innovation Manager, Sue has been part of a restructure to move from traditional workflow processes to a more agile approach. Exciting times as this means getting things approved faster however some Managers are reluctant and causing roadblocks as they keep questioning the changes and the move to a new culture. Sue has requested support as many of her projects are being delayed increasing the back log of projects, which she knows is not impressing senior management.
Amanda (CIO) has identified that Sue needs a mentor to support her through this period and that Managers need coaching on how to embrace the new culture. James (CEO) has agreed with Sue that a package of mentoring for Amanda and group mentoring/coaching sessions for the managers was essential to ensuring the change program was not derailed and that critical business objectives could still be achieved in a sustainable way.
