Laura Francis's posts

Laura Francis is Chief Knowledge Officer at River. Laura joined River in 2000 and became the company’s voice to the market straightaway. Her blogs often focus on how mentees and mentors can get more from their relationships and on ideas for mentoring administrators to use as they run their programs. She also uses her life as a mom to a child with special needs as inspiration for many of her writings.
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Mentoring Ethics

Connect mentoring programs to ethics training to support and guide employees in the real world while they apply their new knowledge.

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Mentoring Groups Help Reinforce Learning

Don't overlook group mentoring as an integrated part of more traditional training interventions. Get ideas here.

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Enhance Employee Training with Mentoring Programs

Are your employees keeping up with changing work demands? Read this to find out how mentoring software and programs can support employee training.

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Webinar Recap: Getting the Most from Mentoring Conversations

What can you do to create productive mentoring conversations between mentees and mentors? Find out in this recorded webinar from River.

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Mentoring Insights from Corporate Practitioners

During two recent River webinars, participants answered poll questions that give us insight into the inner workings and issues facing mentoring administrators in today's organizations.

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The Critical Role of Mentoring Conversations

89% of respondents say developmental conversations between mentors and mentees play the biggest role in mentoring effectiveness. So how are you supporting and encouraging quality conversations?

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Mentoring Administrators Sometimes Need Help Too

Looking for ways to help train your mentees and mentors? Check out this blog and eBook on 5 Tips for Being a Better Mentor.

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Mentoring Brings out the Best in Us

Mentoring makes a difference. Here are three ways mentoring helps bring out the best in us, regardless of our role as mentee or mentor.

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Building Blocks for Modern Mentoring

Adriane Gonzalez examines Modern Mentoring by Randy Emelo and explores the five core concepts for creating a modern mentoring culture.

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Gain Soft Skills While Mentoring

With our lives dominated by screens, clicks and likes, have we lost our touch on interpersonal soft skills? Use mentoring to fill the gap.

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Challenges with Managing a Traditional Mentoring Program

Forget spreadsheets and hand-matching. Here are four ways mentoring software can help ease the burden for implementing a traditional mentoring program.

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Mentoring Agreements Create the Foundation for Your Relationship

Establishing the groundwork for your mentoring relationship is a key element for success. You give yourself and your mentoring partner an advantage by creating a mentoring agreement at the ...

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How Effective Are You as a Mentor?

There isn't a magic formula for being a great mentor or mentee, but there are certainly effective and ineffective characteristics. Which do you have?

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Effective (and Ineffective) Characteristics of Mentees

To help you move your mentoring relationship in a positive direction, here are five effective and ineffective characteristics of mentees.

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5 Ways to Be a Great Mentor

Are you ready to be the best mentor possible? Here are five easy ways you can be a more effective mentor starting right now. Read more!

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The Magnitude of Mentoring

The trickle-down effect of mentoring can lead to every employee in an organization being impacted by mentoring in some way.

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Connect Modern Mentoring to Programs

Guest author Adriane Gonzalez analyzes Modern Mentoring and the idea of connecting modern mentoring in the workplace to existing programs.

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The Value of Context in Expertise

There's value in moving from learning to deeper understanding. Read how that can impact your work and your professional mentoring network.

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Corporate Culture Shines Light on Character

Culture is the heart of the company and is made up of the character of the employees at all levels. See how River lives out our values in this blog.

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Webinar Recap: Building Your Mentoring Roadmap

Building your mentoring roadmap will help you identify opportunities for mentoring program growth at your organization. Get ideas here.

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Stop Training and Start Learning

Go beyond training, and help employees learn. Give them ways to build personal learning and mentoring networks. Learn how in this blog and related eBook.

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Women Get More Done than Men

Female senators get more done than their male counterparts. Statistics back it up.

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Continuous Learning Leaves an Impact

Discover how you can bring learning to all employees at every stage of their career and make it a continuous, open, and inclusive process.

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Reverse Mentoring Is about More than Social Media Skills

This River blog tests some assumptions about reverse mentoring and offers ideas on the practice.

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Rewarding Good Behavior: Companies Succeed with Mentoring

This River blog describes how River helps companies solve real business problems through mentoring, with examples given from EMC and Sodexo.

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It’s Time for a Mentoring Revolution!

We want to help organizations take full advantage of mentoring and all of its scalable benefits. As a result, we declare a mentoring revolution.

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Why Mentoring Women Benefits Your Bottom Line

Don't overlook the financial perks organizations can gain by providing mentoring programs to their female employees.

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Why Millennials Think Your Onboarding Process Sucks

Learn how to make your onboarding process suck less for Millennials and non-Millennials alike.

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3 Timeless Boomer Lessons for Every Generation

This blog from a Millennial at River looks at three timeless lessons she learned from a Baby Boomer, which are actually applicable to every generation.

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Connectional Intelligence: Millennials Not so Secret Weapon

A blog about the Millennial generation's connectional intelligence and how to leverage it to make a multigenerational workforce more productive.

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So what are you waiting for? Contact River today to schedule a demo of our mentoring software.