When Lis Merrick got turned down for a wallpaper hanging course, it set in motion a train of events that would lead her to become one of the UK’s best-known mentoring consultants. Liz Hall explains how
If she hadn’t been turned down for a place on a wallpaper hanging course, Lis Merrick may never have got involved in mentoring again, following a disastrous experience setting up a sponsorship programme at Merrill Lynch. “Because I didn’t know what I was doing and had read one book about it, it was a disaster,” she says of the programme she set up in 1992 to support analysts and associates over from New York.
The failed application was a turning point. It propelled her on to become one of the UK’s best-known mentoring consultants, with her own coach mentoring business, a consultancy role at Clutterbuck Associates and a teaching post on Sheffield Hallam University’s (SHU) coaching & mentoring MSc. Last year, she was shortlisted for Coaching at Work Mentoring Person of the Year 2010.
Merrick had applied for the wallpaper hanging course at Bradford College because she’d planned to take Ilkley by storm with her interior designs. It was to be her manageable foray back into work after a five-year career break raising children. But once she’d got chatting about her background, which included senior HR roles at Merrill Lynch, she was offered a teaching role on the course instead, which was part of a programme to help women get back to work.
“It was hilarious. The universe must have been guiding me.”
Merrick’s first job after school was as a long-haul travel ticket office clerk. She rose to become assistant to the chief executive at Thomas Cook, as well as holding a number of prominent HR positions at Thomas Cook and Merrill Lynch, where she’d gained vice presidency status. However, she was terrified about returning to work. When she arrived at the college in her smart business attire, she felt even worse.
“I came from a nice neighbourhood in Ilkley and these women were on the breadline, all single mothers trying to support their kids. I wanted to sink through the floor.”
Yet she went on to build “the most wonderful rapport in the group. I still treasure a card from one of them wishing me every success in life and telling me to be brave too”.
Rising to the challenge
Another major turning point was when David Clutterbuck came to lecture on her MSc programme at SHU. “It was so funny because before meeting him, I’d devoured five of his books while on holiday in Tuscany. I’d thought, ‘Shall I email him and offer to do some unpaid work leave?’ I hadn’t but it was so exciting to meet this man I’d put on a pedestal. In the coffee break, we chatted about JIVE [a mentoring project tackling gender segregation that Merrick has worked on] and he offered me a job at Clutterbuck Associates.”
Despite her experience at Merrill Lynch, in 2000, when her work at Bradford College led to a request that she develop a mentoring programme, she rose to the challenge. The aim was to encourage more females to study and work within engineering and construction. This initiative came under her remit as co-ordinator on the Let’s TWIST (Train Women in Science and Technology) project. More than 120 women engineers, higher education and further education students and schoolgirls were involved.
From June 2002, she took the Let’s TWIST model a stage further via the five-year European Social Fund JIVE project, set up to address the under-representation of women in the Science, Engineering Construction and Technology sectors. She created customised mentoring programmes for UK and European organisations to widen the support network for women at all levels in these industries. JIVE later became the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology.
Merrick also set up a mentoring programme for the Institution of Civil Engineers and a programme for Bovis Lend Lease for women civil engineers and surveyors.
Chance encounter
Despite all this hard work, Merrick still felt that “my brain wasn’t working”.
“By accident” she met SHU’s Paul Stokes at a Northwest Regional Development Agency meeting. He discussed the university’s new coaching and mentoring MSc. She thought: “Wow, this is what I want to do.” By the end of the first week, “I thought, this is amazing. I was so happy to be there. Gratifyingly, I realised I knew some of it from my experiences.”
By 2004, she was even teaching on the programme: “I’m useful because I am a product of it. I can empathise with the students. ”
In the same year, she launched her own business, Coach Mentoring, still working as a coach mentoring consultant for Clutterbuck Associates.
These days, Merrick does as much coaching as she does mentoring. Yet when she first started doing her masters, she had no interest in it.
“I wanted to be an excellent mentoring practitioner. I got into trouble and was put in my place by David [Megginson, SHU faculty] and Bob Garvey [formerly SHU, now professor of business education, York St John University]. They said, “Lis, if you want to do this properly, you need to mentor and coach.”
“I’m much more effective in my mentoring work now because I understand the coaching and mentoring relationship. I feel very strongly that people running mentoring programmes need experience of a developmental dialogue. It doesn’t work if they haven’t. I really want to spread the word about this.”
She believes supervision is “imperative to keep a programme on track and to improve the quality of the mentoring”.
Mentors can learn a great deal from one another through group discussions. “They might realise that they’re not working with the mentee’s reality, for example. All too often, mentors look at the mentees’ lives and impose their own world. It can be destructive.”
It’s a gift
Merrick has helped set up more than 45 programmes in a cross-section of sectors in different parts of the world. “Nothing fills me with more happiness than getting a good programme off the ground.”
One of her gifts is being able to get people excited about it: “It’s not about trying to rev up the crowd. I feel I am a catalyst opening their eyes to what they can get out of it.”
Mentors should get lots of learning too. “It helps them think about their own lives and relationships and can be incredibly empowering.”
Merrick believes the formula for success is to imitate the same environment as informal mentoring, but with facilitation. “We facilitate it in a way that helps the relationship grow and develop with support, introducing individuals, starting their relationship artificially and supporting them with structure so they don’t get in a mess.”
The importance of allowing the relationship to grow naturally is something Merrick has “really learnt over the past four years”.
Ensuring the organisation is ready to support the programme is important too. “There are always spanners in the works, resistance. There needs to be a safety net in place and someone to turn to.”
Also important is simplicity: “People can try to be too clever and sophisticated with programmes. They need to be simple, meet everyone’s needs and be done in a cost-effective way. You don’t need people to attend all-day workshops – it can be two sets of half days.
“ I like to give people little chunks of learning regularly and get them to go away, practise and come back.”
Open behaviour
Another turning point in Merrick’s work was when she embraced sponsorship – as opposed to developmental mentoring.
“All sorts of weird things were happening – mentors asking for pay rises for their mentees, protecting them from being fired, and so on. Not what you would want, not open behaviour. The final straw was at a supervision group for a large financial services company. One of the senior mentors bounced up to me and said: “Thanks so much for matching me up; I’ve offered him a job.” I had spoken at the workshop about the difference between sponsorship and developmental behaviour. I thought, “I can’t change this, let’s embrace it and talk about it as on a spectrum.”
She now talks to mentors and mentees about visibility and exposure, challenge, the extent of mentor support and organisational politics. Sometimes she includes the stakeholder in negotiations. It is important to “bottom out” issues.
Merrick enjoys working in partnership with other organisations. These include Cumbria Probation Trust; private label company McBride – where she is relationship manager; travel company Abercrombie & Kent – for whom she is running a mini MBA with its talent pool in Mombassa, and the World Wildlife Fund.
Merrick describes herself as having a “bubbly nature” and has heaps of enthusiasm and energy.
Giving it back
She has “workaholic tendencies” but was brought up with a jolt when she did a course in mindfulness recently. “I’m a better coach, mentoring consultant, mother – everything – for it.”
Like her mentors, Merrick is generous-spirited. Giving back is a top value, as is loving and being loved; curiosity and creativity.
One of her heroines is Mother Teresa: “If I didn’t have three kids, I’d be doing overseas relief work.
“This is probably why I migrated to coaching and mentoring. I did have offers to go back into HR but I love this. I really enjoy helping people make sense of their lives.”
“It’s all part of my philosophy to expose people to coaching and mentoring so they can do it for themselves. The more people are empowered to deliver and design good mentoring, the better.”
Lis Merrick is co-delivering a session with Paul Stokes on the coach’s ego at the European Mentoring & Coaching Council conference on 18 November and presenting at the Coaching at Work Beyond Frontiers conference on 23 November.
Coaching at Work, Volume 6, Issue 6