Mentoring is becoming widely acknowledged as a key-learning vehicle in many areas of life and business.

My area of specialisation comes from 20 years experience as a Chartered Engineer performing management roles of Sales, Marketing and Engineering disciplines within the application of Industrial Vacuum. Specifically to sectors including, meat packaging, general packaging, printing and paper, metallurgy, electronics, plastics, material handling, chemical and pharmaceutical production and many more.

I have worked with many sales engineers and project engineers to develop their understanding of the applied technology. Developing skills and knowledge in sufficient depth to allow them to add value to solution seeking when working in partnership with OEM’s, end users and engineering houses.

Specific examples of the benefits I can deliver to individuals will follow, but firstly I would like to draw to your attention how engineering’s professional organisations views mentoring.

The IMechE have a Monitored Professional Development Scheme (MPDS)

They claim that mentoring by Chartered Engineers is key to the success of IMechE's Monitored Professional Development Scheme (MPDS), which has been operating successfully for over 30 years.

The IEE ask What are the benefits of being a Mentor?

Mentoring allows the opportunity to:

• Share your knowledge and experience to the benefit of others
• Broaden and deepen your own knowledge
• Practice and develop your management skills
• Widen your network of other professional engineers
• Gain satisfaction from being able to encourage, support and guide other engineers at key stages within careers

Mentoring is also a growing tool in many areas of the public sector including teaching and health. The General Teaching Council Magazine (Autumn 2005) had several major articles looking at mentoring (and coaching) referring thus;

‘While the concept of mentoring and coaching in education may not be new, strong government backing and overt links to a new continuing professional development (CPD) framework are ensuring that it is entering the mainstream for teachers’.

How do I deliver mentoring and what are the benefits?

I am currently a practising mentor within the life coaching industry and industrial vacuum/air movement industries. I am available to work on an individual mentee basis where certain SMART goals can be agreed between all the parties concerned and a price agreed based on a detailed project specification.

This can be for example end-users and OEM’s with a need to become fully conversant with vacuum technology and its application in the range 0.1mbar(a)-1000mbar(a), or suppliers of equipment to the markets described above. In all cases I will give you the inside track and maximize profitability by instilling confidence and vision through appropriate understanding and market knowledge.

In management roles where leadership and ‘direction of others’ is an issue, I have experienced that a major issue can often be a lack of Emotional Intelligence. Formulaic management tends to try to make people fit a prescribed mould. If a business wants an entrepreneurial response to problems either within or external to the business, formulaic management is not the best solution (especially if creativity exists ‘at the coal face’ but not at HQ).

Understanding the importance of Emotional Intelligence within supervisory relationships can be a key to this situation. My approach when confronted with this problem is to directly address the issue of Emotional Intelligence, communication styles, management style and style flexing. This has to begin with work on truly understanding ones self before we try to understand our colleagues and staff.

What is the Emotional Intelligence theory (EQ - Emotional Quotient)?

Emotional Intelligence - EQ - is a well established behavioural model, rising to prominence with Daniel Goleman's 1995 Book called 'Emotional Intelligence'. The early Emotional Intelligence theory was originally developed during the 1970's and 80's by the work and writings of psychologists Howard Gardner (Harvard), Peter Salovey (Yale) and John Mayer (New Hampshire). Emotional Intelligence is increasingly relevant to organisational development and developing people, because the EQ principles provide a new way to understand and assess people's behaviours, management styles, attitudes, interpersonal skills, and potential.

The EQ concept argues that IQ, or conventional intelligence, is too narrow; that there are wider areas of Emotional Intelligence that dictate and enable how successful we are. Success requires more than IQ (Intelligence Quotient), which has tended to be the traditional measure of intelligence, ignoring essential behavioural and character elements. We've all met people who are academically brilliant and yet are socially and inter-personally inept. And we know that despite possessing a high IQ rating, success does not automatically follow.

The essential premise of EQ is that ‘to be successful requires the effective awareness, control and management of one's own emotions, and those of other people’. EQ embraces two aspects of intelligence:

• Understanding yourself, your goals, intentions, responses, behaviour and all.
• Understanding others, and their feelings.

Emotional Intelligence embraces and draws from numerous other branches of behavioural, emotional and communications theories, such as NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), Transactional Analysis, and empathy. By developing our Emotional Intelligence in these areas and the five EQ domains we can become more productive and successful at what we do, and help others to be more productive and successful too. The process and outcomes of Emotional Intelligence development also contain many elements known to reduce stress for individuals and organisations, by decreasing conflict, improving relationships and understanding, and increasing stability, continuity and harmony.

Full details of my background and references are available on request. Call 01743 249737 or Email.

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