Corporate culture and challenge



In December’s CIPD People Management magazine, CEO Peter Cheese opens the issue with this reflection of 2015:

‘This year, more and more businesses have been rethinking their purpose, and the debate about corporate culture and behaviour has risen up the agendas of business … the HR profession is part of this … we are also examining our own purpose more, and challenging ourselves to loosen our grip on rules and become part of a more profound change.’

Last week, we saw first-hand an example of how the HR profession has truly challenged the status quo of organisational culture.  Su Nandy, Senior HR Manager for Imperial College London, commissioned us to run their first ‘Parent Mentoring’ workshop (we have historically run ‘Maternity Mentoring’).  This half-day workshop focused on equipping a pool of working mums and dads with the skills they need to become supportive mentors.  We discussed everything from the how parent mentoring differs from regular mentoring; to pre-empting, formulating and practising open, facilitative questions, to address a whole range of issues.

Su says:

‘Following a maternity survey which recommended more support for women, we set up a maternity & paternity coaching programme in 2013 and held a maternity mentoring workshop for women. However, the introduction of Shared Parental Leave earlier this year and feedback from the dads workshops, made us realise that there isn’t much distinction between the issues raised by men and women and our mentoring programme shouldn’t be geared just to women. Last week we ran our first Parent Mentoring Workshop to train both men and women as mentors in preparation for a relaunch of the programme in January. We want men to take more of a caring role and we want men’s mindsets to change.  We need men to support women so they can progress in their careers. We support the UN Women’s HeForShe gender equality campaign and we want senior management to take the cultural change on board’

One of the participant’s comments following the workshop was how useful it was to hear  the working dad’s perspective – and if the male delegates now go on to mentor other new and expectant dads – this is the start of a challenging organisational culture which up until now has focused on supporting new mothers only.

May other organisations take Imperial College’s lead into 2016, enabling working dads as well as mums to access work-place career-management support.


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