Mentorship Mastery: Three-Day Mentor Programme

Three days, one group, built around the mentoring you are already doing. Mentoring in medicine is learned by watching, in a role nobody gave you time to review.

Day one builds the foundations. Day two takes on the conversations that stall. Day three puts you into live mentor labs, the Thinking Environment and a set of career counselling tools you can use from your next meeting on.
 

Day one: Foundations of coaching and mentoring

You already coach and mentor, in supervision, on the ward, after a tough shift, whether or not it is in your job plan. Most doctors pick it up by watching other people do it, with no formal grounding in how coaching and mentoring work.

A coach has good questions for your answers. A mentor has good answers to your questions. Day one is the grounding in both, with practical models for conversations that build trust and let colleagues find their own way forward.

By the end of day one you will be able to:

• Distinguish coaching from mentoring and choose the right approach, rather than defaulting to advice giving.
• Structure coaching conversations using a proven model so they stay purposeful, even in a packed clinical week.
• Use active listening, questioning and reframing to help colleagues find their own solutions.
• Contract a mentoring relationship at the outset, so both of you know the purpose, the boundaries and how it ends.
• Build rapport to challenge assumptions respectfully, creating space for growth in your team.

Day two: Advanced coaching and mentorship skills

You have the foundations and they work, until they do not. The mentee who agrees with everything and changes nothing, the one who cannot see a way forward, the conversation that circles the same block.

Day two is about challenge. Holding support and challenge together, working with emotion rather than around it, and running the conversation that shifts how someone sees their situation.

By the end of day two you will be able to:

• Read the emotion in a mentoring conversation and regulate your own response, so the session stays useful under pressure.
• Hold challenge and support in the same conversation, and recognise when a comfortable relationship has tipped into collusion.
• Surface the limiting assumption underneath a stuck mentee, and test with them whether they believe it is true.
• Move a conversation from drama and circumstance into choice, using circles of influence and reframing.
• Spot the early signs of burnout in a colleague and respond with something more useful than a resilience leaflet.

Day three: Mentoring in practice

A registrar who has missed three portfolio deadlines and gets defensive when you raise it. An international colleague nobody sits with at coffee. A trainee with a new adult ADHD diagnosis who is certain it will count against them.

Day three is the practice day. Live mentor labs on the scenarios that are hardest to get right, Nancy Kline’s Thinking Environment, and a set of career counselling tools you can put to work in a first meeting.

By the end of day three you will be able to:

• Run a mentoring conversation with a trainee who has disengaged, without either colluding with the excuse or triggering a defence.
• Mentor across difference, whether that is a colleague new to the NHS or one working with a recent neurodevelopmental diagnosis.
• Structure a session using the CLEAR model, and give feedback with SBI that lands as developmental rather than critical.
• Create a Thinking Environment and use an incisive question to shift a limiting assumption into something your mentee can act on.
• Take a mentee through values, career anchors and the ROADS model, and leave the meeting with a plan and a next step.