10 Mentoring Tips To Be An Amazing Mentor

“A mentor is someone who lets you see the hope inside yourself.”- Oprah Winfrey.  Mentoring someone is a great opportunity to draw upon your skills and help someone learn and succeed in their career and professional life. As exciting as it may sound, it can get overwhelming and intimidating for first-time mentors. After all, your years of experience are put to  test and you do not expect yourself to tumble on it. The approach to mentoring is quite different from coaching and managing, and you will need to develop certain skills to be an effective mentor. This article will discuss 10 mentoring tips that you can use to deliver impeccable mentoring sessions and build a good rapport with your mentees. You can use the below mentoring tips in every mentoring program and even customize it based on your own approach to mentoring.

Mentoring Tips For Successful Mentoring Programs

Learn how to be an effective mentor by following the below mentoring tips created by industry experts of Mentoring Complete.

Know Your Mentee Well

A successful and productive mentoring relationship starts with knowing your mentee well. Asking questions about their expectations, goals, vision, background, and other relevant information helps in understanding the mentee and breaking the ice. As a mentor, it is your responsibility to create an open environment and encourage your mentee to share information. The best approach to understanding your mentee is to introduce yourself and find some mutual interest that can spark the conversation.

Another approach that helps people open up during sessions is conducting activities together. Plan mentoring activities, such as discussions on a research paper, preparing a presentation, volunteering, and attending conferences. Such activities provide a platform to integrate and break down silos.

Open communication and environment is one of the most important aspects of mentoring. And only by knowing each other well, can a mentee and mentor prosper and embark on the journey of learning. Therefore, you must ensure that the mentee gets the right environment from the start.

Ask Questions

A study conducted by Harvard University psychologists found that asking questions, particularly follow-up questions, increases the likeability of the questioner. Additionally, it piques the interest of the speaker and makes them interested in the conversation. It is one of the most widely used techniques by mentors worldwide to understand the patterns, behaviours, and cognitive abilities of the mentee. It provides a sense of clarity and purpose to a mentor, who can then help the mentee remodel their thinking and ways of approaching a problem. 

Asking questions is an art, and you must infuse this quality in the mentee to self-question their wrong beliefs and assumptions, their ways of working, and understand problems from different facets. It is a powerful tool that will help your mentees make careful choices and become aware of themselves.

Set Up Clear Expectations From The Start

Like any other business commitment, setting clear expectations in mentoring relationships is of the utmost importance. It helps both the mentor and the mentee chalk out a path as per the goals and purpose of the mentoring program. Furthermore, holding an expectation call at the start of the program ensures that all parties are relaxed, honest, and engaged in the mentoring activities. 

If you are about to get into a mentoring relationship, then it is necessary to talk to your mentee about the roles and responsibilities, setting realistic goals, and developing an action plan. It has been observed at several opportunities that unclear expectations can result in dropouts and non-achievement of mentoring results.

Discuss Goals-Set Milestones

Goal setting is an important aspect of any mentorship program. It is directly related to organizational goals and might involve learning and development, enhancing productivity and engagement, reducing employee turnover, and upskilling employees. Before starting the mentoring sessions, you should discuss goals with your mentee in detail. Such discussions help in bringing focus, direction, and motivation to the program. 

Your mentee might get intimidated by the large number of goals to be accomplished. Breaking down goals into smaller chunks and setting milestones helps to make them more realistic and achievable. Using visual aids such as Gantt charts, checklists, and shared documents makes it easier to understand goals and assists in quality mentoring.

Practice Active Listening

Research shows that employees spend 45% of their time listening, 30% of their time talking, 16% reading, and 9% writing. This corroborates the importance of listening in a business environment.

Active listening is critically important in a mentoring relationship. It is a skill that is highly regarded in every industry. Just like analytical thinking and problem-solving, active listening can prove to be of massive help both to the mentor and the mentee. 

It is a fact that all good mentors practice active listening to understand their mentors and build a positive rapport with them. To be an active listener, you must create trust and companionship with your mentee. 

Active listening encompasses multiple techniques that are necessary to ward off any misunderstanding and build a strong relationship with the mentee. It provides a clear sight of what your mentee expects from the relationship, their inhibitions, strengths and weaknesses, and much more. 

Some examples of active listening techniques to follow during mentoring sessions.

• Use non-verbal cues to understand your mentee. These include nodding, facial expressions, eye contact, and body language
• Ask open-ended questions to give the mentee a chance to explain his/her perspective
• Demonstrate concern
• Use verbal affirmations. Sherrie Campbell in her successful book “Success Equations: A Path to Living an Emotionally Wealthy Life”, talks about how verbal affirmations in the workplace can help in influencing people and connecting with them emotionally

Challenge Your Mentee

Mentorship is not just about conversations and guidance, it requires a mentor to understand the current state of the mentee and push them to achieve more. By challenging your mentee through different tasks and difficult situations, you help them prepare for real-life business problems. So, ask questions that provoke them to reflect on their knowledge, business understanding and dynamics, and gap in their learning. Helping your mentee do self-introspection will aid in clearing obstacles in their progress. 

Creating challenging tasks and business scenarios should be done carefully. Putting your mentee through rigorous and demanding situations should be done after thoroughly analyzing the capabilities and skills of the mentee so as not to put too much pressure and dispirit them.

Offer Constructive Feedback

Providing feedback frequently in a mentoring relationship is important for the success of a program. You may want to offer feedback to the mentee to enhance the effectiveness of their approach in dealing with certain challenges or situations. Additionally, feedback helps in pointing out certain behaviors and patterns that your mentee might be following subconsciously. 

Offering positive and constructive feedback, supported with appropriate examples and comments, helps in understanding areas of development and specific elements of character that might hinder the mentee’s professional and personal development. Your feedback should not only talk about problems that you have observed, but also offer a solution with a timeframe to rectify it. 

Let Mentee Make Decisions

Your job as a mentor is to steer your mentee in the right direction and not take the wheel in your hands. Offering autonomy and responsibility to your mentee will help them develop skills faster and will prepare them to make decisions on the fly. Therefore, structure your mentoring program in a way that supports your mentee’s decisions and provides them with guidance through their learning process.

Letting your mentee make decisions will build up their confidence, self-reflection, trust in the relationship, and make them more accountable for their actions.

Use Appropriate Mentoring Tools & Methodologies

Mentoring tools and methodologies have a great impact on the overall success of a mentoring program. Based on the current stage of the mentor’s journey, tools and techniques might vary. 

If you are new to mentoring and are in the initial stages of the process, using tools can help you communicate better and provide clear and in-depth insights to the mentee. Furthermore, methodologies such as the Reflective Learning Model help in streamlining the learning process and feedback mechanism.

A seasoned mentor, on the other hand, may want to use complex academic works and approaches that are being developed to engage mentees in conversations and tap into their full potential.Whatever mentoring tools you select, just ensure they help with engagement, encouragement, flexibility, and real-time analysis of the program.

Switch Between Coaching And Mentoring

A mentor is generally someone who has years of work experience and offers guidance with their hard-earned wisdom. They might not have experience in the same industry, but they are thorough with business processes in general. Coaches, on the other hand, are seasoned players with experience in the same industry as the mentee and are called in to tackle specific industrial and business problems.

Using both practices wisely aids in the effective learning of the mentee. Draw upon your experience and offer guidance whenever required. Also, offer to provide strategic inputs to tackle peculiar problems that you observe in the mentee. This way, you can act both as a trusted advisor and role model to your mentee.

Mentoring relationships are unique and might need more than what is anticipated at the start of the relationship. For a mentor to succeed, focus on enhancing the learning experiences of the mentee rather than pushing them for success. Consider the mentoring tips and tricks discussed in this article and your instincts to create a long-lasting mentoring relationship.

We hope the mentoring tips discussed in this article will you in delivering impeccable mentoring programs. Share your own tips in the comments below.