Definition of a Mentor
What exactly is a mentor? Let’s look at some definitions. Merriam-Webster defines it as “a trusted counsellor or guide” and notes that it originates from Homer’s Odyssey, where one of Odysseus’ friends, Mentor, is entrusted with the education of his son, Telemachus.
The key notion in this origin story is that the mentor is in a position of trust and provides education. In this definition, the term is synonymous with “tutor.”
Wikipedia has a similar take on mentorship. As they put it, “A mentor is someone who teaches or gives help and advice to a less experienced and often younger person.”
In business, the role often involves a little more than that. Harvard Business Review writes that “mentorship is a relationship between someone sharing knowledge and providing guidance (the mentor) and someone learning from that person’s experience and example (the mentee).”
The mentor is someone who has had similar formative experiences to their charge, in this definition. This gives them empathic insight into the challenges their mentee will face. This indicates a deeper relationship than a tutor imparting information or facts.
It seems like the core elements of good mentoring are:
1. A level of seniority and experience in the mentor.
2. The ability and desire to support and impart knowledge.
3. A receptive, less experienced mentee eager to learn.
In other words, it’s a two-way relationship rather than a didactic one. The mentor must be an active participant in the improvement of the mentee. A mentor cannot work with a recalcitrant subject and a mentee won’t benefit from a reluctant mentor.
The mentor is invested in the success of their charge, rather than just imparting knowledge and setting their charge loose upon the world. This makes it a rather high-stakes role. A failure on the part of the mentee will, in part, reflect upon the success or failure of the mentorship.
Mentors are not to be confused with sponsors. Sponsors have a financial stake in their charges’ success since they have brought them into the fold to benefit the company. They will introduce their protegees to their networks and directly support their advancement. A mentor will not go so far; their investment is less commercial in origin or intention.
Being a mentor means being able to communicate with your team members, or those you are mentoring, on a more personal level to help them develop the skills essential to growth and improvement.
Questioning and Active Listening Skills
When mentoring, you don’t feed the person with whom you are working with a set of detailed instructions.
You must probe and ask questions about what he does and does not understand.
You’re not a teacher, you’re a guide or a facilitator
If you don’t ask questions and listen to the answers you won’t know what needs to be done next.
But make sure your questions are at a deep enough level to get the person to be thinking in a way that develops their thinking skills.
The purpose here is to ensure they can see challenges in a different way and find answers that maybe others hadn’t considered before.
Naturally, your listening skills need to be in tip-top condition, so you can identify where the feedback your mentee is providing is adequate.
You’re not testing them as such; you’re helping them analyse situations and determine, through your keen interest in them as a person, where their development areas still exist.
Observation Skills
These are important because you must be able to see and understand what the person you’re mentoring is currently doing and/or is capable of.
Observing what a team member is doing now may throw up some ideas about what they can do in the future.
It helps you establish the gap between where they are now and where you potentially see them being in the future.
Observe how they handle problems.
- Are their creative-thinking strategies well-honed?
- Do they see challenges as something to be faced with vigour and courage?
Also, watch how they use their communication skills with others.
- Are they calm under pressure?
- Do they respond thoughtfully rather than react impulsively?
By observing them, you notice where their strengths and development areas are, and you build up a picture of how mentoring can assist them in tapping into potential for improvement.
Analytical Skills
These will give you the tools you need to determine where the person you are working with is falling short and what changes may need to be made.
Thinking analytically is something that can be developed and honed over a period.
You can mentor your team member in helping them to analyse, tackle and sort new information, ideas, challenges, and possible solutions.
Situations where analytical skills can be used could include building organisational skills, troubleshooting problems, setting budgets, researching future opportunities, creating data analysis, running diagnostics, and improving creative thinking.
Mentoring your team member in these skills gets them thinking at a higher level and allows them to show you their value in key areas of the business.
Feedback Skills
You must be able to give constructive feedback that is helpful.
This sometimes may need to be of a development nature, as not everything the team member does will be the well thought through and adapted to the circumstances.
Having said that, negative feedback isn’t appropriate in most mentoring situations.
You must be able to correct the actions and behaviours of your mentee without making him feel as though he failed at a task.
Have the attitude that there are no failures, only outcomes.
If they can learn from an experience, they haven’t failed; they have learned how to ensure it never happens again.
Remember, the whole purpose of feedback is for the person to learn from the experience and improve their future performance.
Ask the person how they feel they are performing.
Highlight the successes they’ve achieved.
Build their character by mentoring the soft skills they need to be even more successful.
Able To Build Trust
An important aspect of both leadership and mentorship is trust-building. When Obi-Wan Kenobi asks Luke to close his eyes in the 1977 Star Wars and use the force to destroy the Death Star, he’s leveraging the trust he’s built with Luke. That’s a real mentorship relationship bearing fruit. Luke is about to do something others might think is crazy, but Luke trusts his mentor, rises to the challenge, and saves the day.
Back in the real world, the relationship of mentor and mentee must aways be one of trust. The mentee is, after all, learning new skills, some of which may not feel intuitive or likely to work. If they trust their mentor, they will be more willing to take risks.
But trust must of course be earnt, and it is advisable to take baby steps towards such bold moves. Trust is built, rather than assumed. As the mentee sees their performance improve, supported by their mentor, they will grow to trust them more. However, the mentor must seem (and be) trustworthy from day one.
A mentor can achieve trustworthiness by being honest, reliable, empathic, and available. In this way, the trust their subject places in them is likely to grow, and lessons are more readily absorbed.
Help Overcome Limiting Beliefs
Some mentees are full of self-doubt. They lack experience and don’t appreciate their own abilities. They may also be subject to a host of unjustified and negative beliefs. For instance: “I’m not going to be accepted in this workplace” or “I’m not as smart or well-educated as my colleagues.”
A good mentor will understand where such doubts come from, even if they had no such doubts themselves. However, everyone has doubts, and everyone has bad days. The mentor should be able to normalise these feelings while explaining why they are not ultimately justified. When a mentee puts themself down, the mentor should raise them up.
Perhaps by using examples from their own early struggles, perhaps by reminding mentees how far they have already come, the good mentor will find a way to overcome these self-set barriers to improvement.
Able To Encourage
Tied in with the notion of overcoming negative self-image and destructive beliefs is the positive push of encouragement. According to research by Linda Phillips-Jones, who looked at hundreds of mentor-mentee relationships in the 1970s, encouragement is one of the primary role of the mentor.
Says Phillips-Jones, “effective mentors encourage their mentees, which in turn helps increase the mentees’ confidence and enables them to develop.” So how do they do this? Phillips-Jones identifies several methods of positive reinforcement including offering meaningful compliments, recognizing milestones reached, and identifying positive traits within the mentee.
The “encouragement” of a sergeant-major is not what is called for, but more the gentle pushing of a supportive parent. Encouragement entails active recognition of achievements; a curt nod of the head probably won’t cut it!
Goal Setting & Focus
On a practical level, the mentor should help the mentee build structure into their improvement. This can be done by setting some concrete goals, deadlines, and milestones. It must be done in collaboration between mentor and mentee, rather than something onerous imposed upon the latter by the former.
As much as possible these should be shared goals, framed as “we should have achieved X by Y date,” to emphasise that the mentor claims ownership of the task as much as the mentee.
As well as helping your mentee focus upon a particular area of improvement (rather than loading them with too many challenges at once) you must be able to focus too. You need to commit to providing an agreed upon frequency of number of contacts per month, be prompt in responding to enquiries and available for emergencies.
This is no small commitment, from both parties, but much can be achieved by “chunking down” the task in hand into a series of milestones. Rather as a marathon runner doesn’t think about the full 26 miles, they have to run but may break down a race into 5-mile segments, a mentee can look towards achieving just the next stage in the process.
Learning how to support this kind of structured improvement is one of the best ways to improve your mentorship.
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