View publication - Chartered Institute of Housing

HOW MENTORING AND COACHING BROKE THE ‘GLASS CEILING’
Personal development interventions we put in place at Genesis
At Genesis we put into place a mentoring scheme. In addition, we ran a number of
training sessions over a two year period for women in junior positions aspiring to
become managers covering things like career planning, building confidence, delivering
and receiving feedback and managing personal stress.
For more senior women, we identified slightly different issues and ran early evening
seminars covering issues such as the ‘Power of Networking, Non-Executive Positions,
Raising your Visibility and Career Planning Strategies’. Which of us hasn’t walked into a
room, and thought how do I get the most of this networking opportunity and not just
end up feeling like a wall flower!
One might say (and many did) that these are things that men can struggle with also;
but the sessions that we ran looked at the particular barriers and issues that women
face in the workplace. The sessions provided a safe all female environment that
allowed participants to discuss the issues that they faced and learn about the techniques
they could apply to change situations to elicit more positive outcomes for them and
their teams.
There was one other thing that came out of our discussions with women across the
organisation – they wanted a women’s network. This took a little longer to come to life
because this sparked quite a debate with support coming from both sexes – as well
protests.
What did we achieve at Genesis?
The feedback from women who attended the learning programmes and took part in
the mentoring scheme was really positive and women felt that they had contributed
positively to job performance and to career development. The surprising thing was
how important women felt that the networking opportunities were that the learning
seminars provided. They gave staff a chance to meet colleagues from across the
organisation and suddenly women were starting to learn about what each other did
and who they needed to speak to in order to get things done. We are an organisation
that works across a large geographical area and it is not always easy to meet other
colleagues. Networking was clearly important not just to career progression (as
evidenced by the research mentioned earlier) but also to improving performance
and efficiency.
131