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Contracting with Mentoring Clients
64 Plays7 months ago
Welcome to today's episode of the ABM Podcast, where we delve into the critical aspects of business mentoring. I'm your host, Kerrie Dorman, founder of the Association of Business Mentors. Today, we have a special guest, Brenda Etchells, who serves as the North Chair for ABM and is an experienced business mentor & ILM7 graduate.
In this episode, we’ll be discussing the importance of contracting with mentoring clients—a foundational element for a successful mentoring relationship. Brenda brings her wealth of experience and insights to this discussion, helping us understand why a well-structured contract can set the stage for effective mentoring.
So, whether you’re a seasoned mentor or just starting out, stay tuned as we explore the best practices and key considerations for contracting with your mentoring clients.
Key Learnings:
- Clear Expectations: Establishing a contract helps set clear expectations for both mentors and mentees, defining the scope and objectives of the mentoring relationship.
- Confidentiality: A contract ensures confidentiality, building trust and providing a safe space for open and honest communication.
- Roles and Responsibilities: Outlining specific roles and responsibilities prevents misunderstandings and ensures both parties are aware of their commitments.
- Goals and Milestones: Setting specific goals and milestones in the contract helps in tracking progress and achieving desired outcomes.
- Duration and Frequency: Agreeing on the duration and frequency of meetings upfront ensures consistency and commitment from both sides.
- Conflict Resolution: Including a conflict resolution clause in the contract provides a framework for addressing any issues that may arise during the mentoring process.
By the end of this episode, you’ll have a comprehensive understanding of why contracting is essential and how it can significantly enhance your mentoring practice.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to ABM Mentoring Playbook
00:00:01
Speaker
Hi, welcome to the ABM Mentoring Playbook. This is your podcast on all things mentoring, tools, techniques, and best practices. I'm your host, Kerry Dorman. I'm the founder and chief ambassador of the Association of Business Mentors. And every month I'm going to be speaking with an expert guest about a specific tool to help you elevate your mentoring practice. So without further ado, let's crack on to this month's episode.
Welcoming Brenda Etchells: Mentoring Contracts
00:00:32
Speaker
Hi, and welcome to the second podcast show of the mentoring playbook, the ABM mentoring playbook. And today I would like to welcome the newly appointed regional chair, North Brenda Etchells. Brenda, how are you? Very well, Kerry. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming on. And thank you very much for introducing the topic.
00:00:59
Speaker
about the importance of contracting in mentoring relationships, because I know that it's been very much a feature in coaching relationships. But to date, it hasn't featured quite so heavily in mentoring relationships, but it's so important, isn't it?
Boundaries & Expectations in Mentoring
00:01:19
Speaker
Yeah, and it's one of the things that I maybe didn't appreciate when I first started out as a mentor, how important it is to establish those
00:01:28
Speaker
establish the relationship and the boundaries and be clear about the expectations of all parties very early on. So yeah, it's something that I learned and I'm probably still learning and tweaking and developing as I go on. You learn with every client. So yeah, it's not like I think you come up with some sort of form of contracting and that's it, tick, you've done it forever. It needs to keep evolving and be right for that relationship with your client.
00:01:59
Speaker
Yes, so I'm exactly the same. I'm still learning and tweaking and I think you're absolutely correct in the fact that contracting has got to be unique to the individual relationship because everybody's different and comes to mentoring for various different reasons. So, but tell me though, are you a coach as well as a mentor? I would say no, I'd say I am a mentor.
00:02:26
Speaker
So within that mentoring, I will do some coaching, but my contracting is very much around this as a mentoring contract. Yes. Okay, great. So tell us a little bit more about it. So you've detailed very beautifully on the accompanying PDF, the stages, but can we just talk through it? And also I think what's important to get across is how you start the contracting conversation.
Formalizing Mentoring Contracts
00:02:54
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm guessing, well, the contracting probably starts previous to that in terms of the initial chat, chemistry call, discovery call, whatever you have, that initial consultation with a client where you will verbally talk about what their objectives are, what they want to get out of fit, what they want from me as their mentor. I will explain then how I work, how many sessions we would have and the cost.
00:03:22
Speaker
So I guess verbally, I've already had that conversation with them. And then I will follow that up with what I would say is the, it's a written contract, but I don't want it to become this like formal legal document. It's more just a, this is what we chatted about. This is what we've agreed. You know, great. And for me, it's like you've signed it, right? We're now in that.
00:03:47
Speaker
We are now formally contracted for me to deliver ex-sessions at ex-cost with these objectives. So it is an actual physical piece of paper? There is. For me, there's an actual physical bit of paper that gets emailed to them. I've got my signature on it. They put their signature on it and they send it back to me. Yes.
00:04:08
Speaker
Okay, that's really interesting. So would you because I would imagine that for some mentors out there, that's quite formal. But would you recommend that that is the best way to approach it? Or can it be very informal as well? Yeah, I mean, I was chatting to a fellow mentor yesterday who said she'd sent off something similar to a client, and it's almost put the client off, they're like, Oh, right, this is too
00:04:37
Speaker
all these terms and conditions are almost too formal for me and I'm now not sure whether I want to do this.
Balancing Contract Formality and Commitment
00:04:45
Speaker
For me, I like it because it's almost there putting their commitment. By their signature, it's almost like that commitment to it. So I prefer them to have signed something to show their commitment.
00:05:05
Speaker
I don't think that, I don't think you have to do it. I don't think there's a right and wrong in this. And I don't think you have to do it. But for me, it gives me a bit of certainty that they know they've agreed to these sessions at this cost. And there's stuff in there that's like, if you cancel within so many hours, you may get charged. But to be honest, I've never, because you build the relationship with the client, I've never kind of gone back and went, well, in the contract, it says, therefore, I'm going to do this.
00:05:35
Speaker
But I think as a mentor and as a professional, it gives me a little bit of certainty is not the right word, but it gives me a bit of comfort in the fact that if I wanted to, there is something there that I could go back to and refer to. I've never had to, and I'm not sure I would in practice, but another example is I had a recent client who contracted for six sessions.
00:06:01
Speaker
after the second session, he's now ghosting me. But I'm like, well, if you're ghosting me, you're not the client for me, therefore, I'm not going to follow that up and say, but you've signed for another four sessions, because what would be the point? There obviously weren't the right client for me in the first place. So, yeah. So it's really about their vested interest in the mentoring relationship, something to refer to if it's not quite working. Yeah.
00:06:31
Speaker
And yes, okay, so that makes absolute sense for me. What happened to the mentor with her client who said it was all too formal? Yeah, she's going to go back to them and just talk to them and just have a conversation with them and see whether she's going to, I think, try and do more like a statement of work type thing and take out a lot of the terms and conditions and the legal jargon and simplify it right down.
00:06:59
Speaker
Um, I know when I first started, I had, I picked up some pro forma, pro forma of terms and conditions and I was winging that out. But, and then you really quickly realize, as you've quite rightly said, that formality can put a lot of people off. So mine's now much more written in my tone of voice. It's much more informal and it's, yeah, it's finding that balance, I think. Yeah. I was working with a corporate recently.
00:07:29
Speaker
And they, with their mentoring programme, but there, they were subsidiary of a much larger German company. And they, the mentors and mentees had to have this very formal contract, even though it was in the workplace. And they had to have very specific outlined goals that they were going to reach before the mentoring relationship could complete.
00:07:56
Speaker
and sign it and then deliver that to HR, which I've never come across before. I thought it was extremely formal and a little bit scary. But actually, 90% of the relationships worked fantastically well because of it. So I guess it's different strokes for different folks, isn't it?
00:08:19
Speaker
Going back to the PDF, you talk about a sponsor. So could you tell us a little bit about that?
Sponsor Involvement and Confidentiality
00:08:25
Speaker
Yeah, so again, this was something that was sort of new to me as I developed as a mentor that sometimes it's a three-way relationship. So you're almost contracting with two different parties. So you'll have the, so a sponsor could be, I don't know, the leadership and development manager, and they say, I have a person who I think would really benefit from mentoring.
00:08:48
Speaker
This is why I think they would benefit, you know, it's XYZ development need. I'd love for them to have six sessions with you. So there's a contracting piece with the sponsor in terms of, that's fine, I can deliver those six sessions. This is what it will cost. But then there's the different contracting piece with a client where there's, okay, I'm going to be mentoring you
00:09:14
Speaker
these are some objectives and it's the confidentiality thing, isn't it? So, but when I'm the client, I have a duty and responsibility to that client to remain completely confidential. And so the sponsor needs to be aware that you're not going to tell them what happens in the sessions, but the sponsor's paying the fee at the end of the day and they're investing in it. So there's that sort of dynamic of
00:09:39
Speaker
The sponsor needs to know the sessions are happening, and there's value in the sessions, and they can see the development. So then there's almost an invisible contract between the sponsor and the client. It's an interesting dynamic when it's three-way, and it's one that a couple of times I've had to have conversations with my supervisor around. So I had one sponsor got in touch and said, oh, has Sonso had all their sessions? And I was like, oh, yeah, they've had
00:10:08
Speaker
four out of six sessions. But I wasn't keeping the sponsor in the loop as to when the sessions were happening. Oh, I see. And I realized that was like a learning thing for me that even though my relationships with the client, I still got a relationship with the sponsor and they should be kept in the loop of
00:10:25
Speaker
the sessions happened on these dates. So Brenda, this is very much a situation in a workplace scenario. Yes. So sponsors, can you just define what a sponsor actually is? So a sponsor for me is the employer or the organization that somebody's working for.
00:10:55
Speaker
Okay, who sponsors an employee to have mentoring sessions? Yes. Yes. Okay. So, because there is a sponsor phrase, well, meaning also in the workplace, which is somebody who is a mentor and beyond. So somebody who is absolutely tracking and helping you and supporting you in order to
00:11:22
Speaker
get a promotion, work in certain departments and work your way up to higher echelons of a company. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I was meaning to sponsor as in, um, I'm trying to think, I don't know, you work for a tissue, same tissue because there's box of tissues on my desk. Um, you are the senior, you're the chief people officer at a tissue company and you have a new senior manager,
00:11:47
Speaker
who's coming into the business and you think they would benefit from some business mentoring. So the sponsor is a Chief People Officer, the client is the new manager. That's our scenario. Okay, yeah, that's clear. Thank you. Yeah. Okay, so let's go back to what you were saying then because that's a different type of relationship stroke contract, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. So what did you learn and what are they after? So I think I learned that I need to keep the sponsor in the loop.
00:12:16
Speaker
And while I don't tell them the content of the conversations, there is a, actually what I learned very early on is you get all three people in the room together and you have that three week open conversation right at the start. So everybody's very clear and I'm not having two separate conversations. I have a conversation with the sponsor and the client together and that helps. So everybody's clear about, so the sponsor can say, this is why I think you need
00:12:45
Speaker
or the benefits of you having the mentoring, the client goes, yeah, I agree. That's a really good development need for me. And we have those open conversations. So I've started doing that now whenever, I always start off now with a three-way conversation. What I haven't done is end it on a three-way conversation, which I'm just now wondering whether that's something I should do. Yeah. Well, good to explore that. Maybe they'll tell you what they want.
00:13:13
Speaker
Maybe different sponsors want different things, going back to our theme. Some sponsors are happy just to pay the cheque and not be involved. So we don't have sponsors in the SME world, do we? No, no. With an SME, it's much more simple. Yeah. So tell me, in this contracting that we are setting out, sort of setting out our store really, aren't we, with a mentee,
00:13:42
Speaker
making sure that we're managing expectations and starting the structure stroke framework really. What about the topic of getting personal? When does that enter a contract? Or should it not? Or what do you think about that?
Personal Matters in Mentoring Sessions
00:14:03
Speaker
When you say the topic of getting personal, what do you mean in terms of the discussions
00:14:08
Speaker
Yes, in some mentoring relationships, there is a need to know a little bit about personal life of somebody in order to either get through a barrier, just knowing. So do you cover that at all in a contract?
00:14:29
Speaker
Now that you're saying that, I probably don't explicitly cover that, but I'm just reading my contract while we sit here. And I do say I aim to support the client's personal development and growth, but it doesn't particularly say personal issues are off the table or they're allowed. But I do when I'm business mentoring, it very often veers into the personal. And at the time in front of them, I will call it out.
00:14:57
Speaker
And I would say, you know, we're going into something quite personal here. Are you happy to continue? Because to me, you bring your whole, it's about the whole self and you can't really separate them out because if something's going on deep within you or it's happened to you in the past, which is influencing how you behave as a business owner.
00:15:18
Speaker
it often helps to bring it out and it gives context as well. But it's not something I explicitly call out in the contracting. And again, see, we're always learning. I'm wondering whether that should be in there. Yeah. Yeah, it is interesting. So I learned initially about contracting from Bob Garvey, who is well achieved in our industry. And he has a lovely, very short video about
00:15:46
Speaker
a very informal way of the initial contracting conversation. And in it, he says to his potential mentee, there will be times when we might need to explore your personal life. And if that is the case, are you happy with that? Yeah. And in it, she says, at the moment, no, because I don't know you well enough. However, as our relationship
00:16:12
Speaker
grows, then that might change. And we'll have to wait until we get there. Yeah. I thought it was a really interesting answer. Yeah. What happens? Actually, do you find that in mentoring relationships, it's a natural, you get to a natural point and, and people, your, your mentee just wants to share and get it all out, which absolutely we're here to listen and to hear. Yeah, great. Okay. So
00:16:43
Speaker
What else can we learn from the PDF?
Concluding Mentoring Relationships
00:16:48
Speaker
Is there, what happens at the end of the relationship? Does what happens to the contract then? So at the end of the relationship, I would sort of, that gives you a chance to say, well, you know, we've contracted for six sessions. We're coming up to our sixth session. You know, let's review, go back to your, I should say, I guess, as long with the contracting, I also send out a sheet where they write down what they want to,
00:17:11
Speaker
get from the mentoring sessions. So we'll kind of go back and review, you know, you said six months ago, this is what you wanted to achieve. We'll do that bit of feedback, that review. And then I'll say, so do you want to re-contract for another three or six sessions? So it kind of leads you into that conversation of let's review what you said, what's happened, and then opens up the question of do you want to carry on and I'll use the phrase re-contract.
00:17:41
Speaker
So then would it be a new contract if you were to continue? Yes. OK, so that's wonderfully helpful in the role of wrapping up a relationship and just reflecting on what's happened and monitoring the effectiveness of what you've been exploring as mentor-mentee. Yeah, exactly. So yes, I would then re-contract based on that discussion.
00:18:11
Speaker
Brilliant. Well, Brenda, that's been extremely informative. Thank you very, very much. Is there anything that you'd like to add? Any top tips?
Customizing Contracts for Client Needs
00:18:20
Speaker
What's your top tip for a good contract? It's not as top tip would be to make sure it fits to what your client is happy. I'm saying happy with. I just want to give you a quick example of I had a client who was neurodiverse and had ADHD.
00:18:42
Speaker
my contract used to say something around the thingies off. It is the mentee's responsibility to complete any activities as agreed and that really freaked her out because of her ADHD. She didn't want to be tied down to specific actions and I'd never thought about how my wording would land with people with neurodiverse or different needs. So I think it's
00:19:09
Speaker
My top tip would be be adaptive to what your client's needs are and make sure the contract works for both you and the client. That's a great top tip. Thank you. Brilliant. Well, again, Brenda, thank you so much for sharing and coming on to the show. And I hope this has been helpful for lots of people out there. I'm sure it has. And see you soon. Yeah, and you. Thank you, Kerry.
00:19:37
Speaker
Thank you for listening to this month's ABM Mentoring Playbook. You can find all of our previous episodes in your ABM members area, including some fantastic downloadable resources to further support you on your mentoring journey. Each one accompanies the topic that I've just been talking about. If you have any suggestions or questions for future tools that we should cover, please do get in touch with the ABM team via email. Happy mentoring. Remember to have fun.