How to Be a Good Mentor

How does mentoring help you? Makes you think a bit and ask some questions about your own performance. Beyond this, you build stronger persons in your organization with competencies needed in the job as well as the capacity to take responsibility. And there is no delay between the "nudge" and the application. It's all applied and hands on. The best of learning, if you ask me. Mind you, if each time they face a problem, they go to you for solutions, they will develop a dependency that will just cripple their own growth! So, how do you mentor them so soon they won't need you and learn to mentor others?

Mentoring happens all the time. You don't need to do this in formal situations. You don't need to organize a mentoring session. Each time you get a question from a junior, counter with "What do you think? What do you propose we should do?" "Any ideas"? Just the idea that they can figure out a problem themselves may take the cork from the bottle. The coach is not giving the answers...she`s helping the learner find them by giving a nudge!

Instead of just giving your decisions on matters that are brought to the table for discussions, ask the following:

Why not look at other data first? What if we take this route? Are there other alternatives that we might consider?

In your mentoring, you can use these leading questions: (Am I spoonfeeding you?). "If we follow that route, how do we go about it? What will we need? Do we have those resources? If we don't have them in-house, where can we get them?"

Sometimes, because of lack of practice and experience, people don't see where ideas lead. They don't think laterally, vertically or across disciplines. It takes experience in many situations to sometimes think of good ideas especially in panic moments. This is where as a mentor you draw from your experience and you show them how to think beyond their usual modes. Tell them about a problem you had and give hints on how you tackled it.

There are many paths to success. There is no model that fits all. Not everyone can be Jobs or Gates. The mentor has to help the mentee dig deeper into his own strengths and how to highlight this for the company's and his own success. The mentor is also there to help the mentee discover insigths into how he can manage his own weaknesses and use this for his success. Or, at least, mitigate its impat on his success. This is where a more experienced person can really provide the insights needed.

Encourage them to be the best they can be. As you build people up, you get to see clearly their strengths and weaknesses. Pay up the strengths especially when you have deadlines and commitments. But when there is an opportunity, help people mitigate the adverse effects of their weaknesses if they are not able to do something about it. Remember, mentoring happens happens during the activity, not afterwards. Post hoc analysis is also important, but it's another tool.

Mentors delegate tasks and responsibilities to people recognizing their capabilities to make a go of it. And when they do, they are recognized. As people learn how much they can contribute, they get motivated. Making them see clearly what they can contribute to the team's success is the task of the mentor. Everybody does not have to be great at everything. When each team member sees how important their contribution is to the team, he/she wll be there to give his/her best.

This program has been instituted in some schools but this would be a very effective program in many organizations especially when new employees come in or when new skills are needed like for example when a new software is incorporated into the system. This will build relationships and also upgrade the skills not only of the people who are being mentored but more so the one mentoring. This is a good way of training people in leadership roles or spotting people who can be promoted later into more leadership functions.

If you have not yet tried this in your organization, start it. This can give new life to your aging employees who not only have the history but also the skills built up for years of working in the organization.