Establishing the Mentoring Collaborative™

Looking back over a long and successful career and life, it is clear to me that what has made the single biggest difference is the presence of mentors in my life. The people in my life when I was young never used the word mentor, but their behaviors spoke to integrity and trustworthiness, listening and being a wise guide in a learning process, as well as creating a safe environment to pursue new possibilities in life. During my professional career, my formal mentors were the ones who were able to see capabilities, to identify stretch challenges and reframe situations to get me to look at things differently. These wise guides created an ongoing conversation of possibilities that propelled me through rich learning experiences and many levels of performance. The mentors in my professional life were also there at the most difficult times in my life extending a hand with no judgments attached. It was the realization almost 20 years ago, by way of the number and diversity of mentors that contributed to my success, which led me to establish The Mentoring Collaborative™. A process that is based on a team of mentors helping a team of mentees expand their learning and potential by the way people and resources are shared among all members. My experience reveals that no one mentor can do it all. This discovery also led to the review of thousands of interviews to statistically isolate the distinguishing qualities of excellent mentors and mentees that drive an effective system of mentoring. I am proud to say that my work in mentoring has established Nova as the only company that can give you a predictive assessment of these qualities. I believe that all people have something to teach and something to learn and The Mentoring Collaborative™ is my way of supporting and giving service to this belief. Let’s have a conversation and discuss how you can become a mentor and enrich your own life as well as bringing meaning and possibilities to the lives of others.

The Power Behind the Mentoring Collaborative™

Nova's Founder, Mary Esteves, has been passionate about mentoring and its power to transform people and organizations since the early 1990’s. Following the need and response from major organizations, she trademarked the name, The Mentoring Collaborative™, in 1998. The Mentoring Collaborative™ has been implemented in organizations large and small in the United States and other countries. The Collaborative has proved to have considerable flexibility in the ways in which it can be implemented depending on the objectives for each organization. The most outstanding thing that has been accomplished is how knowledge gets transferred from one generation and one area of an organization to the next. Every organization Nova has worked with has experienced a rapid acceleration of learning based on Nova’s team approach to mentoring. Research now also confirms the effectiveness of this approach, which has always been the foundation of Nova’s approach. More than 95% of people who have participated in the Mentoring Collaborative™ attested to the program's ability to expand their potential and contribution to their organization. In every organization management cited a reduction in costs to develop people within the Mentoring Collaborative™ as opposed to traditional ways of training employees. This cost reduction has been driven, in particular, by the predictive qualities of Mentor and Mentee competencies identified and measured only by Nova. Nova continues to distill all research, including the latest brain research, to bring state-of-art approaches to mentoring in the workplace. Nova’s work continues to prove that Mentoring is definitely no longer just for a select few people in an organization. Everyone has something to learn and to teach.