Mentorship Workshop

On 9/28/2012

Mentorship Workshop hosted by students Sep 28

By Prof. Leanne Smith

Mentoring is a hot topic. Everywhere I go, when people learn I teach a special topics course on mentorship, they ask questions. They want to know more about it.

This summer, in an “aha” moment at a leadership conference, I realized we have a tremendous opportunity in this course to give back. We have information people are hungry for. If we seek ways to share this information, we’ll be blessed in the process.

So this year, instead of administering a traditional mid-term, I challenged the students to design a workshop to share the information they’ve learned. We invited current business undergraduates and graduate students, alumni, and local business professionals, and hoped to get 40 participants. Instead, we had 80+ RSVPs!

Our theme was “Mentorship: defined and encouraged.” Our goal was three-fold:

1. To define what mentorship is.

2. To so inspire attendees and sell them on the value of mentoring relationships that they left wanting to build personal mentoring relationships.

3. To illustrate a clear step-by-step process on how to build those mentoring relationships.

We also wanted attendees to leave feeling like they’d received a gift – like they were going out the door with more information than they had coming in. Mentoring is a deep topic with many facets. It is impossible to discuss each of these facets in-depth in a 90-minute workshop. But we wanted to cover as much ground as we could, and we wanted to make it interactive and fun.

Hopefully, we were successful.

As is usually the case when you seek to serve, you end up being served. It will be impossible to track all the connections made at our breakfast workshop, but I feel certain the soil was fertile for mentoring relationships to grow. Thanks to each person who attended!

We used two PowerPoint presentations in the workshop. Go to www.leannewsmith.com to access these PDF files. They are listed on the post “Mentorship: defined & encouraged.” Students in the class designed the longer slideshow: Doug Sanford, Josh Clendenen, Laura Wilson, Angela Han, Jimmie Handley and Miles Monhollen.

If you have any questions about this course, the workshop, or the topic of mentoring, feel free to contact me: leanne.smith@lipscomb.edu.