By Mark Moorton, HR Director at Ploughshare
Ploughshare was delighted to be invited and subsequently participate in the Women In Defence mentoring programme. As part of my role as the HR Director, I have been promoting (quite heavily!) the fact that training and development is not just about going on a course, but rather is a blended approach which includes other elements such as coaching, mentoring, as well as a variety of other ways of learning. The mentoring programme sits very comfortably within this approach and provides a valuable source of external (to Ploughshare) support. It also creates opportunities where learning has the potential to go much further than what might have been anticipated at the outset.
For me, being a mentor ticks many boxes – as the HR Director for Ploughshare, I was keen to be as involved as much as I possibly could (but notwithstanding that if we had been over-subscribed with volunteers, I would have stood aside). We are constantly looking to develop our diversity and inclusion practices and by joining in with this initiative, it adds to us becoming an employer of choice for all. I also personally believe in the power of mentoring as a two-way enterprise – as a mentor, I stand to personally gain improvement in the levels of my knowledge, skills and experiences as much as I hope that the individual that I am working with does. And as corny as it may sound, I do like people! It’s great to listen to and understand the issues that others within the Defence sector are coming up against and what, in some small way, I can do to help.
The key takeaway for us as a company has to be that, however a tiny cog we may be in the world of Defence in the UK, we are important and we help to bring about change in all sorts of ways. Providing mentors and mentees as part of the Women In Defence initiative very much helps to support that.
As it happened, I have been partnered with a great mentee who already has taught me many things. One that immediately comes to mind is the use of TLAs – three letter acronyms. I am especially hopeless in remembering what they stand for and early on in our mentoring relationship, my mentee was talking about all sorts of events and happenings at the MOD and using TLAs and I had absolutely no knowledge of what they were. On top of that, I was not familiar with levels of seniority within the Armed Forces and members of the Civil Service that work in Defence and so this too has become a useful learning point for me.
The key challenge in any mentoring relationship is about making time – and then being present when we meet. It’s easy for other work pressures to get in the way of keeping meeting appointments but I think the discipline as a mentor of doing so – and knowing that my mentee is likely to be experiencing the same kinds of pressures – helps to make certain that I keep the mentoring conversations in my diary and treat them as I would for any other priority. To a very large degree, I protect the mentoring calls as much as I possibly can.
All in all, this is a great programme that I am really pleased to be part of.
Hear more from Mark who recently took part in WiD Chatter, a new podcast from Women in Defence Careers to help break down some of the barriers and myths around starting or progressing a career in the defence enterprise.
