I have a complicated relationship with mentoring. Though I’d heard that mentoring was important, I never felt I received much mentoring early in my career, certainly not by anyone who looked like me (I only had one female boss, once, for three months). With decades of workforce experience under my belt, however, I realize that I actually did receive mentoring advice. I just never awarded the term “my mentor” to any of the bosses and colleagues who helped me grow and develop my professional persona.
Looking back, I can see that if I’d had a better understanding of what good mentoring could do for me, I would have been more proactive in cultivating my mentoring relationships, I would have been more open to mentoring advice and I would have more intentionally mentored others. Here are the tips I wish I’d had long ago. I needed a coach to help me understand all this!
What Is Mentoring?
Mentoring is about helping someone earlier in their career set realistic, but aspirational, goals and take well-informed steps to achieve them. Many believe that mentoring happens when a more experienced (usually, but not always, older) person shares their experiences with a less experienced person. While sharing experiences is a critical component, mentoring has more to do with the growth that happens because of the mentor’s ability to help their mentee/protégé grow towards their goals, and if they don’t have any, help them set some.
Good mentoring is goals-driven. It’s based on a good understanding between the two partners about the mentee/protégé’s goals. To the extent they’re unclear, the mentor’s role is to help their partner clarify their short- and long-term goals, sometimes through personal story and anecdote, offering suggestions to explore, and always asking good questions and listening to the answers so you can ask an even more insightful question.
One of the most important gifts a mentor can offer is to help their partner identify good stretch goals to focus on in the short term that, once accomplished, will help their mentee/protégé bridge the gaps between where they are and where they want to go. Sometimes this is a matter of developing some specific technical or soft skills (e.g., getting a certification or working on conflict management). It can also be gaining insights from a new kind of experience (e.g., a global project or cross-functional process).
In helping someone come up with good goals, it’s always important to remember that, although they may be on a similar path to yours, it’s not your path. This is why the best mentors help their mentee/protégé partners identify good questions to research for themselves. A mentor can provide information in response to these questions, but it’s best not to provide answers. Give your perspective and then support them in identifying other resources (mentors/networking contacts, associations, articles etc.) to explore in coming up with their own answers.
As a mentor, your experiences only matter to your mentee/protégé if you’re listening intently to the challenges your partner is having, identifying their actual challenge (which isn’t always what they think it is) and choosing to share specific experiences that illustrate specific input you want to give them. This means that waxing poetic about how you landed your first job may or may not be all that relevant to what they need to hear.
How to “Get” Someone To Become Your Mentor
Many early career professionals ask me, and each other, “How do I get a mentor?” This question often presupposes that the mentor and protégé have a formal, typically one-way, relationship. While this is sometimes true, more often than not, it’s an informal and subtle relationship where both parties benefit. When you speak with people who have long-standing mentoring relationships, you find that they often begin informally, when these two things happen (in any order):
- The mentee/protégé expresses curiosity and respect about the mentor’s experience, and how it could help them reach their own (stated) goals
- The mentor expresses curiosity about those goals and offers insights, advice and stories that help their partner imagine their own success and gives them inspiration and ideas for how to achieve it.
Either party can initiate this cycle, but it only works if both engage and find the relationship valuable. If either party get distracted or disengaged, even the most formal mentoring relationship will wither away. The process for inviting anyone into this kind of exchange, whether you’re the person in power or not, is also the same:
- Reach out and ask for time to get to know the other person
- Show up on time and be present and curious
- Listen, take action on any advice given to you
- Followup and invite more contact
Many people assume people who could mentor them are too busy or self-important to take time to give people “below” or “behind” them advice. While this is sometimes true, it’s also sometimes not and you can end up with a particularly strong mentoring relationship just by proactively looking for it.
Skills You Develop By Mentoring Others Well
Too many mentors enter the relationship believing they are there to donate their time without receiving anything except for some good feelings for “giving back.” If this is your attitude you will probably find yourself becoming disenchanted or unable to find the time to provide ongoing mentorship.
In fact, mentoring someone is a great opportunity to build and refine soft-skills and gain fresh perspectives to make yourself more innovative, creative and aware. When mentors have their own goals in the mentoring relationship, they will be more engaged and likely to help themselves and their partners at the same time. Here are some great ways to think about building up your own skills while mentoring others:
- Become a champion listener
- Learn to ask great questions that expands your understanding of something you’re curious about, which your mentee/protégé knows more about
- Reflect on your own success and identify lessons learned you can teach others
This latter point is more important than you might think. Self-awareness is a key skill for success, giving you information about yourself that you can use to become better at what you do and grow more intentionally into your best self. Self-awareness is highly correlated with leadership effectiveness and success. And the ability to be self-aware is a skill we gain by leveraging some natural proclivity (i.e., curiosity), but which takes focus and intention to refine as we mature and become more emotionally and intellectually complex.
We can all benefit from greater self-awareness, but when you find your career or progress stalled, there is almost always a clue to getting unstuck found by looking inward.
For more resources on mentoring women on the leadership track, check our InPower free resources and paid mentoring toolkits.
Mentoring Mistakes to Avoid
What good mentoring is not, is the opposite of everything listed above. Self-focused story-telling, giving your mentee/protégé goals you think they should adopt, telling them what to do or how to do it… all this robs them of their agency and disempowers them instead of helping them and building their confidence.
As tempting as it is to answer their questions and give them answers and certainty, it’s better to help them find more questions and lean into their discomfort, which is where their growth lies. To do this, practice responding to their questions with questions of your own. This will help you develop your listening skills, but it will also encourage them to dig deeper into their own thinking. When they get to the point where they don’t have any answers, help them brainstorm places to seek the answers and offer them support in getting access to the information they need.
Here are a few quick tips to help you catch yourself wandering into the bad mentoring zone:
- If the mentor is doing most of the talking, they need to ask more questions
- If either party finds themselves giving yes/no answers to their questions, or getting yes/no answers, they learn to ask better questions that stimulate thinking and dialog
- Mentors, ask yourself if you know what your mentee/protégé is trying to achieve, if you’re not crystal clear ask questions to help you both focus on their goals
- Leave each conversation knowing the next steps and followup actions for the mentee/protégé
These are the things I’ve learned about mentoring as I reflect back on the mentors I did and didn’t have over the course of my 40 year career. Were I to do it all over again, I would have:
- asked for hard-to-hear feedback on my goals and challenged myself to hear even the things I didn’t want to hear
- Leaned on multiple mentors for different kinds of feedback instead of looking for “the one” who not only got me and empathize with my experiences, but also people who didn’t fully get me but had wisdom to share anyway
- Been more diligent about follow-up with people who gave me advice, showing my appreciation with action and given budding mentorship relationships the opportunity to bloom
As a mentor, I would have encouraged all my mentee/protégé partners to do the same and been more proactive in reaching out to invite mentoring partnerships with people I felt had promise and just needed some insights and guidance. Live and learn. I’m not dead yet. I, like you, have lots of time to improve and grow.
