One-to-one professional mentoring with Euan Wilmshurst, for senior communications, engagement, and advocacy professionals across philanthropy, non-profits, and social impact. Sessions are built around the mentee's actual work.
Senior comms professionals spend their days advising everyone else. It is rare that anyone advises them. The more senior the role, the fewer people there are to think it through with, and the higher the cost of getting it wrong.
Euan mentors senior communications, engagement, and advocacy professionals, one to one. There is no curriculum. The sessions work on whatever the mentee has in play at the time.
Every mentee sets their own agenda. These are the kinds of questions the sessions are built around.
A defined engagement with an agreed cadence, set at the start.
A scoping session sets the agenda. Themed working sessions follow, each shaped by what the mentee needs next.
A short framing note before each session, and a written summary after it recording the thinking and the next steps.
Sessions work on live material, whether that is a strategy in draft, a board paper due next month, or a decision that needs making this week.
Problems rarely arrive to fit the diary. When something urgent comes up before the next session, the mentee can pick up the phone.
Introductions to people doing the same job in other organisations, and into the networks where they gather, drawing on thirty years of contacts.
Every engagement is built around the individual, so no two are the same. This is one example, to give a sense of the shape.
Agrees the focus, the structure of the sessions that follow, and the personal development goals the engagement is working towards.
What a function like this one should be capable of, and the distance between that and where it sits today. Timed, where possible, ahead of something real in the diary, such as a board paper or a strategy refresh.
Often engagement, strategy, and influence, including influencing upwards. Personal development runs through each session rather than sitting separately at the end.
Pulls the thinking together and finalises the personal development plan the mentee takes forward.
The two are often used interchangeably. They are different things.
This is mentoring from a practitioner. Euan has run communications, advocacy, and social impact functions at senior level for thirty years, in corporates, foundations, and agencies. The mentoring draws on that experience and the judgement that came with it.
He is not a certified coach and does not claim to be one. Where formal coaching is the right tool, he says so and recommends qualified coaches.
Mentoring works with one person. Where the need is to bring a whole leadership team to a shared position on strategy and narrative, that is the Strategic Narrative Workshop.
Euan has spent 30 years advising senior leaders on strategic communications, advocacy, and social impact, with a particular focus on philanthropy, education, early childhood, and international development.
His last executive role was at the LEGO Foundation, leading advocacy, partner engagement, and external communications. Before that, senior roles at CIFF, The Coca-Cola Company, Pearson, WPP, and IBM. He has twice represented private philanthropy on the global Board and Executive Committee of the Global Partnership for Education.
He has led communications and advocacy functions at every scale, and has mentored practitioners throughout his career.
Always interested in hearing from communications, engagement, and advocacy professionals considering mentoring, and from the chief executives who lead them.
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