by Center for Mentoring Excellence | Aug 4, 2015 | Facilitating Learning, Making Mentoring Work For You, Mentoring Communication, Mentoring Relationships
“A story is the shortest distance between two people.”
— Pat Speith
Sharing personal stories, successes and challenges serves multiple purposes in a mentoring relationship.
- Stories build trust, keep a mentoring relationship real, create a comfort level, and give your mentee “permission” to share their own.
Hearing stories about your career and personal challenges provides a powerful impetus for mentees to take action.
- Your setbacks remind them that successful people do face and overcome roadblocks.
By sharing strategies for solving problems and dealing with adversity your mentee learns from your experience.
- According to psychologist Uri Hasson, “Anything you’ve experienced, you can get others to experience the same.” People accept ideas more readily when their minds are in story mode.
Telling your stories and sharing your learning demonstrates openness and respect, and builds trust.
- It creates points of connection, a shared language, and grist for ongoing conversation.
Your story motivates mentee self-reflection.
- It activates their brain cells, stimulates critical and creative thinking, and increases their self-awareness.
So, what is your story?
How can you tell it in such a way that it invites conversation, reflection and learning?
Encourage your mentees to share their stories by:
1. Sharing yours
2. Thinking, in advance, about what you really want to know about them
3. Asking specific questions to encourage them to reflect on their career path, specific experiences, previous successes, and work projects
4. Listening closely to what they say, how they say it, and the words they use to describe their experiences
5. Asking probing questions to encourage them to reflect on the lessons they have learned from their stories
by Center for Mentoring Excellence | Jul 9, 2015 | Making Mentoring Work For You, Mentoring Training
When we wrote Starting Strong, our primary goal was to help people understand what really good mentoring conversation looked like in practice. Second, we wanted to address some very basic (and commonly asked) questions: How do the individuals who are engaged in mentoring experience the relationship? What do they think about? What do they talk about? What conversations should they engage in to build their relationship and facilitate the learning process?
Starting Strong is a combination of two books in one – a mentoring fable and a conversation playbook. The fable presents an in-depth look at the dynamics and conversations inherent in a mentoring relationship when it is first starting out. The characters in the fable represent a composite of real life mentoring issues, struggles, and challenges. The conversation play book contains a set of tools to guide the reader’s mentoring conversations.
We had hoped that Starting Strong would provide a reference, a resource, and case study scenario. However, it wasn’t until recently that we discovered just how powerful it was as a training tool for raising the level of trust, deepening the relationship and keeping mentoring pairs on track.
Our Observations
Starting Strong enabled mentoring partners to build trust quickly because it created a shared language and understanding right from the start.
Starting Strong provided a roadmap for keeping relationships on track. As a result, new mentoring partners were more confident because they knew what to expect and they had the tools and strategies they needed to guide them.
Starting Strong gave experienced mentors new insights that allowed them to recognize what was missing in past mentoring relationships and better understand why they went off course.
Starting Strong provided a context for the training so that participants had a mental picture of what good mentoring looked like.
Starting Strong increased mentee understanding about the purpose of mentoring and their role in driving their own development.
Starting Strong gave mentees a better understanding about the role of their mentor in helping help them tackle their issues – without solving the problem for them.
How Reading Starting Strong Can Help
Each participant was sent a copy Starting Strong prior to the initial mentoring training and asked to think about specific questions prior to the initial training.
- What resonated for you? What surprised you? What is something new you learned?
- Mentors: What skills and competencies do you admire the most in the mentor, Cynthia?
- Mentees: In what ways do you relate to the mentee, Rafa? What did you learn from his experience?
We found that reading Starting Strong made a significant difference in the quality and depth of the mentoring conversations that took place during and after the mentoring training.
Our observations were validated by the participant comments five weeks following the training:
- Starting Strong was valuable in helping me know what I could expect.
- Starting Strong challenges traditional views.
- It gave me comfort to know there was a clear roadmap I could follow.
- Starting Strong was an eye opener about what good mentoring really looked like.
- It prepared us to start on the right foot and understand what we were getting into.
- It guided us step by step through the conversations we needed to have.
- It jump started our conversation.
- Starting Strong focused us on addressing some things we might not have addressed.
- The book opened the door to the different conversations we need to have.
- Starting Strong offered an example of a mentor and mentee and seeing their perspective.
Action Step:
Ask participants to read Starting Strong prior to your next training event. It will kick start mentoring training and get mentoring pairs started on the right foot.
by Center for Mentoring Excellence | Jun 12, 2015 | Growth and Development, Making Mentoring Work For You
By: Lois Zachary
I was excited to see What Do You Do With An Idea? hit the Wall Street Journal top ten bestselling hard cover nonfiction book list. I received my copy of Kobi Yamada’s book more than a year ago as a thank you gift from my mentee, Linda.
I treasure it because it came from her and because the story parallels our mentoring journey together. Like the character in the story, she developed the confidence and competence she needed to take her ideas, grow them and significantly influence others as they blossomed.
Mentees come to us with ideas, ideas they may not yet have articulated, even to themselves. They may have snippets of ideas, glimmerings of ideas, or even half-baked ideas.
Once they surface in conversations with us, our mentees begin to wonder what they are going to do with their ideas — where they are going with them or if they’re worth doing anything with it at all.
Ideas have a habit of clinging to us like sticky paper. Our ideas remain in our heads even when not pursued — after all, they are our ideas. Some mentees lack the confidence to share their ideas for fear of embarrassment or rejection.
In the Yamada story, a child’s idea begs for his attention. He ignores it (even though it still bubbles up from time to time) until one day he summons up the courage to talk about his idea. And, when he does, the reaction to it is negative and gives him pause, but only for a short while. He begins to dream about his idea. Dreaming energizes him — makes him feel more alive. His confidence grows alongside the passion for his idea.
As he becomes more self-aware, his worldview and perspectives expand. He discovers that having different ideas is okay. He comes to own his idea because it is, after all, his.
I think the book jacket sums it up nicely: This “is a story to inspire you to give your ideas some time and space to grow and to see what happens next.”
“Lois, when I came across this book, I knew it was what I wanted to give you as a thank you. You have worked with me, with my head full of scattered ideas for four years now, and you have influenced me so much by your ideas.”
Thank you, Linda! I can hardly wait to hear about your next idea.
by Center for Mentoring Excellence | May 15, 2015 | Facilitating Learning
We recently talked about the top ten best practices for mentors. But what about the mentees? Don’t worry, we have you covered!
Here are top ten mentee best practices from our 2015 Mentoring Matters Reader Survey:
1. Focus on achieving learning goals
- Learning is the purpose and the payoff of mentoring. It’s easy to get sidetracked and lose focus. After three cups of coffee and little work on leadership development, mentoring fizzles out. Goals help you stay focused, moving in a positive direction, and benchmark your progress.
2. Expect to drive the mentoring relationship
- Mentors are not mind readers. Be prepared to ask for what you need, when you need it. They won’t know what you need unless you tell them.
3. Create SMART goals that will contribute to your development
- Fuzzy goals result in fuzzy outcomes. Make sure your goals are crystal clear to you and your mentor. Goals need to be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely.
4. Be authentic, open and honest
- Your willingness to be vulnerable makes a significant difference in your growth and development. If you pretend that all is perfect, your mentor will never get to know the real you, and you will miss out on real learning opportunities.
5. Prepare for all mentoring meetings
- Advance preparation for mentoring sessions will save time, make meetings more efficient and result in more meaningful learning.
6. Stay connected and in communication with your mentor
- Utilize multiple ways to stay connected to your mentor. Regular and consistent communication is the name of the game, whether it’s face-to-face, email, Skype or telephone calls, the operative word is “and.”
7. Be willing to stretch and step out of your comfort zone
- Expect your mentor to challenge you with questions and learning opportunities that might take you outside your comfort zone. They may initially make you uncomfortable, but the stretch is what will maximize your learning.
8. Ask for specific feedback
- Your mentor’s honest and candid feedback will contribute to your self-awareness and get you to the next level. Practice asking for specific feedback and be prepared to receive it without being defensive. Share feedback with your mentor and act on what you hear.
9. Focus on the future
- It’s easy to get bogged down in day-to-day issues instead of focusing on your future. Keep in mind that mentoring creates momentum towards your future development. Be prepared to articulate your vision for yourself so that you and your mentor can create strategies for your future success.
10. Keep a journal
- You will want to make notes of conversations that reflect your learning, and also track your mentoring progress. A journal is a great place to record insights and questions in preparation for mentoring meetings. Although keeping a journal requires discipline and practice, it’s well worth the effort.
If you have other best practices that you’d like to add, please let us know!
by Center for Mentoring Excellence | Apr 28, 2015 | Growth and Development, Making Mentoring Work For You, Mentoring Relationships
Our recent annual Mentoring Matters Reader Survey revealed dozens of best practice topics. This blog is the first in our series of mentoring best practice posts soon to follow. Based on our survey results, here are the top ten:
- Start by getting to know your mentee
- Make sure you take time to get to know your mentee before you jump into the work of mentoring. Nothing of substance will happen until you establish a trusting relationship.
- Establish working agreements
- Agreements lay the foundation of a mentoring relationship. Build in basic structures about how you will work together moving forward. Make sure you and your mentee agree on ground rules.
- Focus on developing robust learning goals
- The purpose of mentoring is to learn. Learning is also the payoff. Make sure the mentee’s learning goals are worthy of your time and effort. Developing robust learning goals takes time and good conversation.
- Balance talking and listening
- It’s easy and natural to want to give advice, especially because you’ve “been there and done that.” But mentees want more than good advice. They want you to listen to their ideas as much as they want to hear what you have to say.
- Ask questions rather than give answers
- Take the time to draw out a mentee’s thinking and get them to reflect on their own experience. Ask probing questions that encourage them to come up with their own insights.
- Engage in meaningful and authentic conversation
- Strive to go deeper than surface conversation. Share your own successes and failures as well as what you are learning from your current mentoring relationship.
- Check out assumptions and hunches
- If you sense something is missing or not going well, you are probably right. Address issues as soon as possible. Simply stating, “I want to check out my assumption which is … ” will prevent you from assuming your mentee is on track.
- Support and challenge your mentee
- Work on creating a comfortable relationship first before you launch into the uncomfortable stretch needed for deep learning. Mentees need to feel supported (comfortable) and yet be challenged (a little uncomfortable) in order to grow and develop.
- Set the expectation of two-way feedback
- Candid feedback is a powerful trigger for growth and change. Set the expectation early on. Be prepared to offer candid feedback, balanced with compassion. Model how to ask for and receive good feedback by asking your mentee for specific feedback on your own mentoring contribution.
- Check in regularly to stay on track
- Keep connected and develop a pattern of regular engagement. Both partners need to be accountable for following through with agreements. By holding an open, honest conversation about how you’re doing and what you need to do to improve, you encourage mutual accountability and deepen the relationship.
What do you think? Did we miss any best practices? Let us know!
Keep a lookout for our next blog later this month, Top Ten Best Practices for Mentees.
