
Mentoring

… giving you the confidence to be a memorable mentor
As a mentor, you build a relationship and a position of trust with your mentee. During the discussions, your mentee may reveal a range of things to you such as their ambitions, their concerns, their history, their expectations and more.
There may be a day when in the midst of those discussions, you become aware that the mentee (or someone they work with) is breaking organisational policies or rules.
As a mentor you have a responsibility to your employer to ensure the organisation is compliant with governance and legislation. You also have a confidentiality agreement with your mentee. SO you are now in a position of conflict.
What do you do?
What ideas do you have for handling this dilemma?
Generally speaking a mentor has a focus on asking questions rather than talking too much in a discussion. There will be a sharing of information and the meeting certainly doesn’t want to be an inquisition but a comfortable mix of questions, answers and input will lead to a productive session.
Many mentors are experienced managers and as good managers we often fall into the expediency trap and pepper our conversation with colleagues with closed questions – “did you”, “will you”, “have they’, “is it” etc. In our time-pressured environments, we’re sometimes only wanting to verify information rather than end up on long discussions.
In a mentoring context, closed questions can be really useful if you want to focus a discussion or control a conversation if your mentee is want to talk a lot or evade answering for example.
The old favourites “who, what, why, when, where and how” establish a round of open-ended questions which will also serve you well. This questioning technique draws out more information, enables someone to give fuller answers and helps you to probe a little more deeply to identify issues or get the mentee to expand their thinking.
A word of caution: use the “why” question sparingly – it often puts people on the defensive and you’re not likely to want to go there in a mentoring relationship!
So, check in with the amount of questioning vs talking you are doing a in a mentoring conversation, and the type of questions you are using to elicit responses.
There are many definitions of mentoring, not one accepted definition. It used to be considered that mentoring was about tutelage by a more senior person. That came from the derivation of the term mentoring being based on Greek mythology. It is said that when the King went to war, he asked his friend Mentor to guide and develop his son Telemachus who would be the next King. So it prevailed that the term mentoring came to be known as being developed for a role by a wise and experienced person.
These days, mentoring takes on many guises and does not need to be a senior person, a formal arrangement or to be developed for a specific role.
Here’s what I know.
Mentoring is about people It’s about trust. And it’s about learning.
Mentoring has to take place in the context of a relationship. Two people come together. Now two people come together often but it usually isn’t a mentoring relationship. So, what makes it a mentoring relationship? The fact that one of those two wishes to gain value from the other. It could even be the case that each gains value from the other as in peer mentoring.
Now, in a formal arrangement such as a mentoring program, the coming together is ‘manufactured’ in the sense that there is a defined purpose and structure. It may be that the mentor is assigned or the mentor may be selected from a pool of possible mentors or a person may seek their own mentor – however the program decrees.
In an organic mentoring process, the mentoring may well go unsaid. The relationship may never be labelled as mentoring. This relationship occurs naturally. A person finds someone whom they believe (consciously or unconsciously) they can learn from and so they spend time together or find opportunities to interact.
When I ask people in my training programs, who do they consider to have been a mentor, invariably they identify:
That’s not to say mentors do not occur in other areas of life but these tend to be the most common responses. And these are situations where people are generally placed in each others path by circumstance. By being exposed to each other either one considers they see potential in the other and help to guide them, or, the other sees things in the other which gives them a guidepost.
A mentor can be self-appointed but if the other party does not see that person as a mentor, there will be no mentoring!
What enables one to consider another as a mentor?
Trust. Trust on so many levels.
Without trust, the relationship will falter if it gets off the ground at all. And it’s worth bearing in mind that it takes time to develop trust but can be lost in an instant.
Like trust, if there is no learning, I would argue that there is no mentoring taking place.
That learning may, as I said earlier, be conscious or unconscious. When I look back on mentors in my life, the ones I value are the ones I learnt most from. Let em give you two examples.
Everyone has someone in their life who stands out as a shining example of how NOT to be or behave. A mentor is remembered as someone from whom you learnt a positive experience. It may be how to do something, how to behave, how to approach something, a way of being, an attitude, how to navigate politics in your career, how to broaden your thinking or views, any number of lessons can be learned. From a mentor you often don’t just learn the lesson but you consciously apply it and hold them up as a guiding beacon to remind you.
So, back to our question ‘what is mentoring?’. Let me turn it around…
What is mentoring to you? Drop your thoughts in the comments section below. I’m keen to hear your ideas.
While mentors are often nervous about starting a mentoring partnership, it’s the mentorees who are often less knowledgeable about what the process is, how it works, what to expect, what to talk about and what stages the partnership goes through.
This quick introductory video gives a few ideas about what the journey of being mentored is like.