When successfully done, mentoring can help someone achieve their goals – bring them to the job of their dreams, able to live life to the fullest, as a result of being guided onto the right path. Mentoring works for the security industry, and in life more generally. But there are buts.
Those were among the insights to come out of a recent OSPAs thought leadership webinar, chaired as ever by their founder, Prof Martin Gill of consultancy Perpetuity; remarkably, the 155th, as he came up to two years of them, having begun with the first, spring 2020, lockdown. All three of his, UK, speakers, were fulsome in their praise for what good mentoring can do – indeed, for both sides, not only the obvious one of the more junior person learning from the more senior and experienced. But, the benefits don’t just happen.
As ever, Martin introduced a panel of three: Yolanda Hamblen, Head of Security Operations, Virgin Media O2; Claire Humble, former policewoman (in the UK and New Zealand) and then head of security at Teesside University in Middlesbrough, now running her own consultancy company Nuology; and John Sephton, formerly of Axis Security, now key account director for another guard firm, Bidvest Noonan.
You, the person being mentored, need to figure out what it is that you want to be mentored on (how to reach a particular job, or to progress from ground-floor security officer to superviser to manager to director?). For that progress, you the mentee need to have in your mind an answer to the mentor’s questions: such as, where do you want to be in one year or five years? Or is there some ultimate goal that you have in mind?
The mentee mustn’t be afraid to ask questions; but mentoring is a two-way process; it might not be generally appreciated that the mentor, commonly someone older and more senior that the one asking for the advice, may come away having learned something also. But for mentoring to work, both sides have got to want to do it.
Membership of an industry body may be a way to access a mentor, or to give something back if you are able and willing to share your experience. Significantly, all three speakers have been or are members of such bodies: John is a fellow and director of the Security Institute and praised the Institute’s platform whereby you can volunteer to be a mentor, or ask for a mentor; Yolanda is a member of ASIS UK; and while at Teesside Claire worked voluntarily on a diversity group within the campus security managers’ association, Aucso.
The webinar also ranged over how mentoring can be an answer to bringing on women to make the security sector more diverse; men can mentor women (and vice versa).
More in the April print edition of Professional Security magazine.
About the webinars
The OSPAs webinars are free to listen to; they typically run on Thursday afternoons; or you can listen after the event. It’s a busy time of year, OSPAs-wise; the annual thought leadership summit is back in person in London on Thursday, February 24, the afternoon of the evening UK annual awards.
The webinars continue in March; first on Thursday, March 3, when the subject is ‘influencing opinion to improve perceptions of the security sector’. The comes ‘horizon scanning: how good are we at predicting the future?’ on March 10, and Artificial Intelligence on March 17. You can sign up or listen back at https://theospas.com/thought-leadership-webinars/.
