One-to-one Mentoring for top Executives
Over the past few years, Pete Ashby’s work as a mentor has mainly developed out of his facilitations for Boards and Executive teams. He now usually mentors at least six Chief Executives and Executive Directors at any one point in time.
Sometimes Pete is called in by a Chief Executive to provide mentoring and coaching for themselves or a member of their top team. At other times 2WayTrust mentoring arises out of conflict resolution work, when Pete helps to resolve an immediate conflict and in the process the CEO identifies a need for some ongoing mentoring to avoid the situation repeating itself.
For this sort of work we don’t name our clients on this website, because Pete is often most effective where he can support a CEO in tackling whatever it is that’s holding you back at the very top of your organisation in a way that is almost invisible to the outside world.
Money back guarantee
As with all of 2WayTrust’s work for Boards and top teams, one-to-one mentoring is covered by our money back guarantee. At key stages Pete asks whether you’re satisfied that you are improving your performance as a leader and the issuing of an invoice at the end of the contract depends upon you saying “yes”!
Sharing the risk
Chief Executives see the money back guarantee as an important symbol of Pete sharing the risk that you’re taking if you take him on as your mentor. And Pete’s experience has been that it’s this sense of shared risk that makes it easier for him to challenge clients on the “difficult stuff”, that is so essential to moving forward.
He argues that key breakthroughs with clients only come after quite a bit of challenge, which in some cases wouldn’t have been possible without the money back guarantee.
So far, no one has asked for their money back.
No set formula
Once the overall fee and terms of the money back guarantee have been agreed, Pete works on the basis that there’s no set formula. A CEO’s view of what they need often changes once the mentoring is underway, which is why we’re careful to agree a framework that can evolve as we move forward.
Work with a CEO or Executive Director is usually spread out over a three month period, with a mixture of one-to-one meetings, weekly phone calls and back-up emails. Pete and the CEO nearly always need two half days together early on and they then ration out face-to-face time according to the targets that they have agreed for their work together.
Mentoring Directors on behalf of the CEO
An aspect of Pete’s work that’s growing in importance involves him in mentoring Executive Directors on the invitation of the CEO, to help tackle a specific issue of under-performance. A separate page offers a guide for CEOs on managing under-performance.
The very term under-performance can trigger a defensive response among many, which is why we are always careful to say that in our experience it’s only top performing teams that are comfortable discussing and owning under-performance. The simple fact that it has been acknowledged and is being dealt with is in itself a tribute to the CEO and Executive Director concerned.
In these cases, Pete offers the Chief Executive and Executive Director a joint money back guarantee. He holds an initial meeting with the CEO and Executive Director to agree the key objectives of the mentoring work and then has further meetings with the two of them at an interim stage and at the end of the mentoring.
Apart from these joint meetings, Pete works directly and confidentially with the Executive Director as if the approach had come from them rather than their CEO.