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When working for a company, people often have colleagues to turn to when they need advice on how best to complete a task or to make a good career move. Sometimes another person, even on the same level as oneself, may have a different perspective and an idea on how to make something that seems impossible work.
However, when you're self-employed things can be quite different. You can feel isolated and stuck with no one to turn to for good, impartial advice and help.
Peer groups are often a help, but what do you do when you work alone and don't have a peer group around you?
Aly McNicoll, training director of the New Zealand Mentoring Centre, discovered her solution ten years ago.
She enrolled in a course on mentoring that dealt with the concept of peers helping each other rather than going to an expert. She and the other participants formed a group and experimented with ideas and methods..
"We ended up with a toolkit and a model that worked well for us for peer mentoring. The principle was this: no one person in a group knows as much as the whole group put together," says McNicoll. "Certain people will hold special skills or sub-skills. This can outweigh having access to one expert.
"You're dealing with a range of experiences. The best thing about mentoring is that it offers other perspectives. Having a peer-mentoring group is low cost. It's reciprocal and involves bouncing off ideas with professional friends. It's a matter of developing unconditional support and regard," says McNicoll."It's been significant for me as a self-employed person."
McNicoll's background is in counselling and adult education.
"I found the group useful for the business development side of my work and to look at the pace at which I was working," she says. "People often feel like they're in permanent white water at work. They can't stop and think. Mentoring gives an alternative to desperate paddling. It helps you see there are other ways of doing things. It also makes you realise you're not alone."
Peer mentoring is something that is often used in the academic environment, getting students to help and co-operate with each other and share resources. But for the self-employed it is more unusual.
The New Zealand Mentoring Centre's programme, which McNicoll describes as a "developmental step" of her own peer-mentoring group, has seen much interest from overseas.
"We have taken our toolkit to a number of international conferences and given people a taste. We've had a huge response and have got lots of work in Australia and the United Kingdom, and more recently in the United States.
"We have developed something unique here in New Zealand. We've started with a model and built it up."
So, how does peer mentoring work? According to the New Zealand Mentoring Centre, three or more people form a peer-coaching group and meet on an ongoing basis to provide regular professional development and support for each other.
The group uses the tools developed by McNicoll and her colleagues to "enhance their ability to learn from the experience".
The tools involve: sharing challenges, difficult situations, sharing and learning from successes, developing new responses for future situations, exploration of professional issues, giving feedback to each other and supporting each other in the work.
McNicoll says the tools are important as "if you don't give people the tools, the group often becomes a chat and gossip sessions. The tools give it focus, a purpose."
They create a structured process where people are committed to attending the group. "Informal groups can be nice, but they won't necessarily provide mentoring outcomes."
McNicoll stresses that trust is important in all peer mentoring groups. "Peers have the advantage that they've got nothing to prove. There's no need to impress. Confidentiality is very important, as is recipricocity. It's all give and take."
To get the tools, McNicoll offers a one-day course, at a cost of $495. She says this day gives people the focus and strategies to make their group work. Participants of each course are encouraged to form a peer-mentoring group among themselves and to meet for about two hours each month.
"This creates accountability. Each member of the group needs to tell the others what's happened in the month. This is useful for people who work on their own. They hold a good deal of responsibility and often have to make complex decisions on their own. Some peer advice always helps. If something is urgent, there's always someone on the other end of the phone to help out."
Someone who has recently done McNicoll's course and formed a peer mentoring group is Carol Scholes, a business coach for not-for-profit organisations.
Her reason for doing the course was that as a self-employed business person she wanted to communicate with others with similar situations and to explore issues they had all experienced.
She has formed a group with two others from the course, and incorporated another two. Their professions range from someone who specialises in team building to an entrepreneur.
Scholes says there were 14 people in her peer mentoring course.
"We were encouraged to go away and create our own groups. The three of us gravitated towards each other. We've included the other two because we needed a bit more diversity in our professions. We wanted other thought processes."
She says the value of the course was that it gave her a structure for the group's meeting. A good side-effect of peer mentoring, she says, is opportunities to network.
McNicoll agrees that peer mentoring groups can help with quality of work and networking. "With a self-employed person, a client may need skills a person doesn't have. Perhaps that person could refer to someone in the group."
McNicoll says with regular mentoring, when something happens, a person can think, 'I'll take that to the group and work it out there', rather than carrying it around and worrying. In short, a peer-mentoring group can help for stress management.
If you want but more of a networking focus, there are groups that specialise in this area. North Shore copywriter, Word Wizard Lynnaire Johnston, belongs to a Business Network International (BNI) group and says she has probably increased her business by 50 per cent through it.
Cost of membership is $500 a year. Group members meet weekly for breakfast or lunch (the cost of food is not included in the annual fee).
Before joining a group, members are put through induction training and a training manual is also provided.
Johnston says the meetings have a definite structure.
"They're one and a half hours, so we have to keep with the programme. Each member gets 60 seconds to talk about their business needs every week. The result? Referrals."
She explains that the idea behind BNI is six degrees of separation - someone is bound to know someone who can increase your business.
"It's worked tremendously well for me. I have found it to be highly professional and members are keen to support each other."
Johnston says that there is a mentoring side to it, but that comes in an informal way through the development of relationships.
"The idea is to attend every week, meet the same people and get to know them. This creates solid business relationships. People get to know you, like you and trust you. They feel safe referring people to your business.
"Basically, you prove yourself to them. There's no room for chancers. The motto is: 'Givers gain'."
Just like peer mentoring, networking groups are a "good way of not being isolated when you have your own business. You go to the meeting, talk and eat and then get back to work. It shows you are not alone."
