Action Learning Associates partnered with Norfolk and Suffolk County Councils recently to provide action learning facilitator training for a team of professional mentors. The purpose of the initiative is to equip the mentors to offer action learning sets to registered managers of care homes, or similar. Action learning will enable those managers to navigate complex challenges they face, whilst building on the existing skills portfolio of the mentoring team.
One of the challenges for mentors can be to make a shift from offering information or advice to mentees, which is often core to a mentoring role, to offering open questions in an action learning style instead. One participant, Mark, offered a useful insight to peers in his training group to help make this psychological and practical transition from guidance to questions: ‘If I think of a solution and frame it as a question, it’s likely to come across as a suggestion.’
I find this helpful because it signals the implicit, subconscious influence that our thinking, as facilitators or peers, can have on what we do and on the impact it can have. This could include, for instance: our thinking about our role; how we believe we could add most value to resolving an issue; what we think the presenter could or should do etc – even if we don’t say it out loud. This calls for us to prepare ourselves mindfully before we step into a round.
