OKMN Peer Mentoring Groups connect local manufacturing leaders in a confidential, supportive setting to share experience, tackle challenges, and strengthen their businesses.
Peer Mentoring Groups Explained
About the Peer Mentoring Groups
Running or overseeing a manufacturing operation can feel isolating. The responsibilities are enormous, the pace is relentless, and many challenges can’t be openly discussed with employees, advisors, or even boards. OKMN Peer Mentoring Groups were created to fill that gap — offering a trusted, confidential forum where leaders can speak freely with others who truly understand their world.
Each group meets monthly and brings together individuals from non-competing companies who want to grow their management skills, improve operational performance, and build more profitable, resilient organizations. It’s a chance to step away from the daily pressure and spend time working on your business with peers who are facing similar realities.
Peer Mentoring Groups
Two Groups, One Shared Purpose
OKMN currently runs two peer mentoring tracks, each designed for a different type of leadership role within manufacturing companies. Only one representative per company is permitted in each group, ensuring open conversation, trust, and confidentiality. All members sign a confidentiality agreement, and no competitors or suppliers are ever present.
Executive
For CEOs, presidents, owners, and leaders responsible for overall organizational direction. These members bring strategic challenges to the table — succession planning, expansion, long-term productivity, financial performance, and how to guide their businesses through industry change.
Operations
For operations, production, plant, or general managers who are responsible for keeping day-to-day operations running efficiently. These discussions often focus on workforce issues, workflow improvements, continuous improvement, equipment planning, and solving recurring operational bottlenecks.
What To Expect
How the Peer Mentoring Groups Work
Each Peer Mentoring Group meets once per month for a half-day session, typically hosted at a member’s facility. Meetings follow a consistent structure to make the most of everyone’s time:
- Networking and connection, giving members a chance to catch up and build relationships.
- Company updates, where each participant shares current wins, roadblocks, and emerging issues.
- Identification of topics, allowing the group to decide collaboratively what matters most that day.
- Focused discussion, where members offer insights, share relevant experiences, and work through solutions together.
- Tour of the host facility, offering real-world exposure to different operations, workflows, and improvement strategies.
- Expert insights, when needed, from subject-matter specialists invited at the group’s request.
Although each meeting is facilitated by an experienced former industry leader, the agenda and direction come from the participants themselves. Members guide the conversation, support one another, and hold each other accountable to real progress.
The Benefits of Networking
The Value of Peer Mentoring
What makes these groups effective is the combination of shared experience and real accountability. Members quickly discover that even across different sectors, many challenges are the same — lack of skilled labour, supply chain pressures, cash flow concerns, equipment planning, team development, productivity issues, and the complexities of scaling.
By hearing how others have solved similar problems, participants gain practical solutions without the trial-and-error or cost of outside consultants. They also build a network of trusted peers they can rely on long after the meeting ends. Most importantly, the groups give leaders something they rarely have: protected time to think, plan, and move their business forward instead of getting pulled into the daily noise.
Get Involved
Join or Start a Group
Peer Mentoring Groups work best at a certain size, and OKMN continues to build waitlists as new groups are formed. If you’d like to learn more, join an upcoming group, or suggest a new peer mentoring group for a specific niche or function, reach out to peter.jeffrey@okmn.ca. OKMN welcomes conversations about new group formats and is happy to explore opportunities where peer mentoring could support leaders in other areas of manufacturing.
