Growth is something I’m committed to – for staff, for clients and for anyone else who crosses our path (as our Parramatta coworking space friends will attest).
Since the early days of my business, I’ve viewed our role as not just serving clients, but mentoring our clients and their people. It’s true, we earn our keep by charging clients to complete projects that they don’t have the experience, skills, connections, time or technology to do themselves, so you’d think that we would want to keep our knowledge secret.
But no, we believe that the stronger and more experienced our clients are, the better the work we can do together.
I learned early in my career that to be of influence and successful, you should give your power and knowledge away.
We have been fortunate to work with many clients with insightful business leaders who have seen the value in this approach. We genuinely want to support emerging staff to succeed. We want to stand beside them and give them the support and practical advice that will make them better at their job and help them further their career.
Training is valuable for everyone, and we were excited last year to have been chosen to work with City of Parramatta Council to deliver crisis communications and PR training to small businesses in the region.
But on the job training, and especially side by side mentoring, is my go-to favourite for effectiveness, and it is especially valuable to staff who are at the beginning of their career journey.
Our Mentorship Program delivers a mix of structured sessions and flexible professional counsel and advice. Over a set number of hours per month we focus on identified needs. These focus areas include training in communications skill, tactics and strategy plus valuable soft skills for reaching potential within the business, including leadership, persuasion and most of all – believing in yourself.
So, what’s involved?
The goal is to ensure job satisfaction for the mentee, while increasing communications capacity within the business to ensure effective delivery of programs to drive business performance.
Some of our topic areas include:
Professional development: building and managing key relationships (including managing upwards), identifying priorities, managing multiple projects. Tailored to suit an individual’s professional style and business needs.
Social media: A mix of very practical skills for each of the platforms plus content creation guidelines (what’s important for each different channel) and result measurement.
Media management: Media release and message development, how to choose the best media opportunities (and which ones to pass on), how best to support internal and external spokespeople to deliver the best interviews, building and utilising networks, and identifying which media opportunities are best handled in-house v outsourced, plus pitching stories and building relationships with media.
Campaign and strategy development: Identifying and understanding audience and messaging, setting KPIs, defining milestones.
Personal growth: Understanding ‘who I am’ and ‘who I can be’ and working out how to get there. Networking skills, mindset development and lateral thinking.
Goal setting and prioritisation: Understanding the needs of different stakeholders. How to keep a project on track, including creation of plans and calendars and use of communications tools. Problem solving and focusing on outcomes not outputs.
Advocating for quality communications: Helping all stakeholders understand the value of communications and earning trust by delivering results.
Issues management: Brand safety and risk identification.
If someone in your team is looking to grow and you think we can help – I’d love to hear from you.
Sue Hardman