Building Mentorship Networks

My college John discussed building a mentorship network at the same time we create a learner network. I have two thoughts on this. 

First regards my industry and injuries and fatalities. Whenever there was an injury in our contractor organization there would be a spate of miss-communication and innuendo all throughout the organization. One week we had an arm amputation in south Texas at the same time we had a truck accidentally spill out noxious chemicals onto a southern Illinois neighborhood near a refinery. Both bad events, and thankfully no one in the neighborhood was hurt or injured as the gas wasn't hazardous, just smelly, and the amputation turned out to be the result of bad medical advice. Regardless, as a part of the safety group I started getting all sorts of calls from field supervisors looking for information on the fatality that had occurred in Missouri. Somehow the stories had been conflated and morphed into a completely different story. It took dozens of calls to get the information out. It would have been nice to have that network set up within the safety and supervisor community so we could get the information out to them quicker and better . . . get them information on how to re-train and keep their own team safe. As an addendum we could have communicated to our clients that our teams had been retrained and briefed within hours instead of weeks. It's easy to see how powerful that type of tool could be for information dispersal. 

The second thought hits directly on John's mentorship idea. We provide leadership training for supervisors and crew leaders. During the one or two day classes the learners develop very strong relationships with the facilitators. At the moment, when they leave there is no connection back to our organization or the facilitator. That relationship is severed almost as soon as the class is over. There's no chance to follow up with them, determine if the class or the tools and techniques were effective, and no chance for us to leverage the mentor/student relationship to get them enrolled in more advanced classes or more students from their organization. 

This is one network I'm trying to create right now. I ask all of our leadership learners to enroll in our LinkedIn page for leadership so we can maintain that connection and that relationship. We only started it in November so thus far we haven't gotten as many discussions started as I hoped, but I have my fingers crossed for luck. But basically the mentor/student relationship you were discussing in your post is exactly what I hope to create as a learning community for our contractor members.