Mentors have been a strong driving force behind some of the most successful individuals in history. Everyone gets mentored by someone at some point in their lives. For some, it might be their father, mother, teacher, professor, manager, family friend, or colleague. If you are a senior professional, you can surely point to someone from your early years in your career who has been a guiding light on your path. After several years, you might want to give back the same experience to some other entry-level professional who is struggling. You may do it out of personal motivation or as a career opportunity, as mentoring is in short supply and in growing demand around the world. Being a great mentor needs efforts, experience, and qualifications.
However, professional mentoring can get you further down the line because both the mentor and the mentee work in the same industry but at different levels. Often, the mentors are highly experienced individuals who have made several hard decisions and have seen more of life than the mentee. As a result, they can read a conflict situation, weigh the outcomes, and choose what is right to do with much expertise and conviction.
Tips for being a great mentor
1. Communicate and listen.
Communication is the key to great mentorship, just like any other relationship. It is good to give your ideas and knowledge to your mentee; however, it is a bad idea to lead them down your path. Understand that your mentee is a human being with his or her own plans and desires. You must support their plans and desires instead of injecting your own. To understand what is inside your mentee's mind, simple communication can help.
Ask the right questions.
Start by asking them if they need your advice or support right now or on this particular issue. It is never a good idea to offer anything of value to someone who does not need it. Open-ended questions that lead to the self-discovery of the mentee are an asset in mentoring. Sometimes, a mentee already has the answers or solutions they desperately seek outside themselves. In such cases, all they need are a few insightful questions that give them internal clarity or meaning. It helps them identify patterns away from chaotic thoughts and helps them become independent thinkers. Ask them about themselves, their thoughts, emotions, situations, choices, possible consequences, etc. This opens up a pool of insights and strengthens their decision-making process.
Even if you have a strong bond with your mentee, refrain from asking personal, invasive questions. Just let them know that you are available for advice and wait until they open up. As mentoring requires two-way communication, doing all the talking will get you nowhere.
However, sometimes your mentee can be too insecure to ask a question or seek advice. If that is the case, work on building trust. Communication is the key to holding vulnerable conversations. People need a higher degree of trust to open up to someone in the first place. So, define clear relationship goals and a standard for specific outcomes. Create a goal and try to reach it within a specified time. As time is the most valuable resource, a mentee generally understands the value of time and loathes to waste any. Clear goal setting, building trust, and transparent communication can break the ice over time. With these three aspects in place, you can move on to sharing ideas, opinions, thoughts, and feedback.
2. Tell your story and offer encouragement.
Mentors are often chosen by their mentees because they see in them their future selves and a guiding light for their paths. As a result, there will be enough common struggles, intertwining decision trees, and patterns between a mentor and a mentee that differ only in time. A mentor is a living testimony to the problems that a mentee is facing. Due to this, storytelling can be a great way to incite passion, offer encouragement, or share your ideas. Telling your personal stories and struggles from the past can help them open up. Many individuals also find it hard to put into words what they are feeling due to communication problems or a fear of being judged. Stories can break these mindsets and help both the mentor and the mentee sit in the same boat. Stories can also generate ideas and illustrate possible outcomes. In a way, they will herald mentorship in an unprecedented way that no training can teach you.
3. Let your mentee make decisions.
It is easier to fall into the trap of dictation when you have been through the ups and downs and know what has passed and what might have happened if you had chosen otherwise. However, mentorship is not taking the wheels off your mentee and riding their life for them. Free will is the greatest gift given to mankind, and snatching it away will never yield anything worthwhile. The role of a mentor is to guide their mentee through their life and career situations. Mentors help them to develop skills, think independently, and make informed decisions regardless of the risks involved in each option available for decision.
For this, be a great channel of open communication instead of an outsourcing platform for decision-making. Besides, giving your mentees the autonomy to make their own decisions can positively affect your relationship if they see its worth and invest more in it.
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4. Offer advice and criticism constructively.
Despite a mentor's efforts, mentees often make mistakes and make the exact same mistakes their mentors warned them about. Sometimes, mentees ignore mentors' advice and fall down the rabbit hole. It is easier in these cases to say "I told you so" and continue lecturing, which in most cases makes the mentee miserable and subconsciously tears them down.
Even informed mentors refrain from giving criticism directly to their mentees. They instead use a personal story that runs in parallel with the problem of their mentees. In the absence of a fitting story, give criticism sandwiched between encouragements or appreciation for achievements. However, between mature mentors and mentees, one can offer direct criticism if it does not break the person down or the confidence within the relationship.
5. Become a role model for your mentee.
Your mentee watches your every move, consciously or subconsciously. This is especially true in crisis situations where your mentee is having a hard time completing a project or making a bad decision. They observe your reactions when you are stuck in a similar situation. In such situations, your behaviour becomes a decisive factor in their perceptions of you. If you act maturely, stay calm, and create solutions without losing your cool, you will earn their respect. Vice versa, if you are negatively influenced by the obstacles, you will inevitably push your mentee away. Mentorship is not
6. Introduce your mentees to your network.
First, it is not mandatory for mentors to open their networks to their mentees. However, if you have a personal bond with your mentee and certainly know someone who can help your mentee get better at any area of their life, you may do that. While doing this, also consider how the individuals in your network may feel because of the introduction. If the introduction is solely for the purpose of business or career, they might feel bad about the relationship in the beginning itself, which must be avoided at all costs.
7. Offer Encouragement
When a mentee wants to learn from someone about their experience, they frequently choose a mentor who has gone through a comparable event. Given that you have already been through it, it can be easy to fall into the trap of telling your mentee what to do in this situation. Avoid doing it! Instead, support the mentee and create a secure environment where they may express their concerns, exchange ideas, and ask questions in order to better grasp the problem. Encourage your mentee to persevere through challenging circumstances, support them when they take on a challenging or novel task, and rejoice with them when they achieve success.
8. Dig Deeper
While a mentee shouldn't expect you to fix all of their problems, they also shouldn't expect you to simply listen to them and nod in agreement with everything they say. Asking questions and probing further into what the mentee is saying is a necessary component of being a mentor. Perhaps doing so entails questioning their presumptions and forcing them outside of their comfort zone. Or perhaps it means trying to figure out why they think or feel the way they do. Inquisitive questions can be used to guide the mentee toward learning the truths that will help them arrive at solutions. Attempt repeatedly asking "why" in response to each response. To start peeling back the layers and getting to the source of the problem for long-term success, you can even try asking "why" more than once in response to each explanation the mentee provides you.
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9. Listen with compassion.
But there are instances when simply listening is the finest thing a mentor can do. This is not to say that you shouldn't converse with others, share tales, or do any of the other things mentioned here, but you should be aware of when your mentee needs you to stop talking and start listening. Be kind while you listen. Try to comprehend your mentee's perspective and any other influences that might be made apparent through what the mentee says. After you've listened, you can start asking the mentee questions to delve deeper into what they've said and clarify what it is they hope to get out of the conversation.
10. Practice empathy.
It's critical to connect with your mentees and comprehend their viewpoints and emotions. You should pay attention to their energy and try to cheer them up if they are having a terrible day. Even though you may feel that empathy cannot be taught, it may be improved with practice. This involves work, including increased listening, curiosity about others, appreciation for others who are different from you, illumination of any ingrained judgments, and self-education to dispel myths and uninformed beliefs.
Organisations must adapt to the changing times. You can communicate with someone who was able to avoid that issue and still fulfil the same position and responsibilities far more effectively if you can set aside your own thoughts about how difficult things were for you. Change your procedure if it isn't working. Be flexible as you go and involve your mentee in decision-making.
11. Share Ideas
Mentors seek you out because they respect your judgement. You shouldn't try to control the conversation or tell your mentee what to do or not do, but you can certainly give them advice on any problems they may be having. If they say yes, start a conversation where you all share ideas and build on one another's thoughts. Ask them if they want to brainstorm ideas together. For many of their ideas, you can serve as an objective third party. Sometimes all the mentee has to know to decide on a professional path or other course of action is to hear the possibilities. They may also discover solutions they hadn't thought of.
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12. Get the right qualification.
According to Wall Street Journal, 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies have formal mentorship programs. This proves the scope of mentorship in the future. In the digital age, you can easily earn a certificate in mentorship without quitting your job. These qualifications give you structured guidance from industry experts, which increases your understanding. It will familiarise you with all the above-mentioned steps while also giving you additional authority over your work.
If you are a seasoned management professional with experience in coaching or mentoring, you can choose SNATIKA's highly prestigious and advanced UK Masters degree in Coaching and Mentoring. It offers you dual academic qualifications and global recognition for your mentorship. Within 12 months, you can earn this British academic qualification without quitting your job or compromising the quality of your learning. Visit SNATIKA if you are interested.
Conclusion
Being a good mentor is more about your communication skills and emotional intelligence, although it also helps to have formal academic qualifications. By listening actively and with empathy, giving constructive criticism, and sharing your own stories and ideas, you build a solid relationship between you and your mentee. If you are working, you can even open your network for them. However, this is rarely seen in formal mentoring relationships. At the end of the day, your advice coupled with initiative, leadership, and experience will influence your mentee.
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