Mentoring relationships that work: six key ingredients
Formal and informal mentoring programs are increasingly seen as important mechanisms to support leadership development programs, drive succession groups, and develop talent within organizations, both at the junior and senior levels.
Mentors can play a key role in helping to provide unique insights into how organizations actually operate, key trends in an industry, and share practical stories about their own lessons learned from their career.
Often times, mentors and mentees / protégés get together and fail to get the most out of their mentoring relationship. This article provides seven key areas that a mentor and mentee can focus on to create a more focused and impactful relationship.
Six key ingredients for successful mentoring include:
1. Think about what you want out of the mentoring relationship.. Mentors and mentees alike can benefit from doing some pre-work and thinking about what they want to get out of the mentoring relationship. The mentee is often thought of as the top earner, but successful mentoring relationships aim for a two-way process in which mentors also benefit.
Questions to consider before the first tutoring meeting are: What do I want to get out of the mentoring relationship? What do I bring to the mentoring relationship? (skills, questions, ideas, stories) What are my expectations?
two. Set clear boundaries. It is important to set clear boundaries for the mentoring relationship and conversations. How often will they meet? When? Where? How can you be contacted and at what time of day or night? It is surprising how some of the inconvenience that mentoring relationships encounter are caused by a lack of clarity about boundaries.
The questions to consider are: What do I see as my role? What are my expectations? What areas does the mentoring extend to? What are my limits around meetings? (Time, location, frequency) When and how I want to be contacted (email, phone) What is a middle ground for the two?
3. Create meaningful and relevant goals. Take time during the first meeting for the mentee to identify their goals for the mentoring relationship. What do they want from the conversations? Whenever possible, encourage the learner to create SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). Throughout your conversations, refer to these goals and monitor the progress the learner is making with them.
Four. Create a mentoring roadmap. Having an agenda, or a roadmap, of where you want your conversations to go will help maximize the time you have together. You can also avoid the awkward silence of “What do we want to talk about today?”
Based on the learner’s goals, it will be beneficial to identify various topics / topics that the learner wishes to gain knowledge about. Schedule these topics in the meetings you have assigned. For example, meeting two may focus on industry trends, meeting three on time management, meeting four on the most important lessons learned, and meeting five may focus on technical issues.
5. Go ahead. Successful mentoring relationships are built on trust and open communication. Follow-up is an important part of trust. Follow jobs both ways. As a protégé, what have you agreed to follow? What actions have you indicated that you will be responsible for? As a mentor, what do you need to follow up on? What information, resources or contacts have you indicated that you will provide?
6. Check in on the way. It can be very helpful to check how the tutoring conversations are going along the way and to make any necessary adjustments.
Three questions to ask at the end of each mentoring conversation are: What was useful about our conversation today? What are your next steps? What will you do / learn / explore before our next conversation? What changes should we make for our next conversation or what areas do we want to focus on?
Incorporating many of these questions into your planning and mentoring conversations can add impact and benefit to both mentors and protégés, leading to a stronger relationship.