by Center for Mentoring Excellence | Jan 23, 2015 | Facilitating Learning, Growth and Development, Making Mentoring Work For You, Mentoring Relationships
Starting Strong walks you through several fictional mentoring examples, highlighting the importance of the first 90 days of a mentoring relationship and pointing out invaluable conversations to have.
One of those fictional examples introduces readers to Rafa.
Rafa is a composite of hundreds of mentees we have worked with over the past 15 years. He’s an ambitious Millennial, and impatient to make it big and fast. To help him on his professional path, Rafa’s company has matched him with a savvy and experienced mentor. This is new for him, and he has no clue what to expect from a mentoring relationship.
Sound familiar? If you’re someone who is new to mentoring like Rafa, our new book, Starting Strong, can help you jumpstart your mentoring relationship and get it on solid footing right from day one.
Starting Strong models mentoring best practices by taking you inside a mentoring relationship, allowing you to observe, feel and experience six key mentoring conversations as they take place.
As the story evolves over the first 90 days of their mentoring relationship, Rafa comes to appreciate the importance of a good launch, and the critical role preparation plays in moving forward. He learns many lessons about how to build a trusting, open and honest relationship, how to maximize his mentoring time, and how to take charge of his own learning.
The Conversation Playbook that follows the story is jam-packed with strategies, tips and probing questions that you can use to your advantage while working with your mentees.
Here are five ways to use Starting Strong to deepen your relationship, stay on track and raise the level of your mentoring practice:
- Invite your mentees to read Starting Strong and discuss Rafa’s experiences.
- During one of your initial sessions with your new mentee, address the questions at the end of each chapter.
- Prepare for your mentoring meetings by selecting questions from the playbook to deepen your mentoring conversations.
- When you bring your mentoring relationship to closure, give your mentee a copy of Starting Strong as a gift. It will help them prepare for the transition from mentee to mentor.
- And, don’t forget to benchmark your mentoring practices against those described in the book.
Purchase your copy of Starting Strong today!
by Center for Mentoring Excellence | Jan 20, 2015 | Mentoring Relationships, Mentoring Training
Are you an active mentor?
Do you believe you can get better at mentoring?
If you’ve answered yes, then you owe it to yourself to hone and deepen your mentoring skills. And, there is no better teacher than Cynthia Colson. But who is Cynthia Colson?
You’ll meet Cynthia and her mentee in our new book, Starting Strong. Cynthia is an experienced mentor who is committed to her own growth and development as a mentor and the growth and development her mentees.
The story of Cynthia and her Gen-Y mentee unfolds over 90 days (six mentoring meetings) and you get to sit in on each of them. You will hear their private thoughts before, during and after their meetings. At the end of each chapter, you will find questions to prompt personal reflection and spark conversation about the chapter content.
The conversation playbook guides you so that you can engage in parallel conversation with Cynthia and her mentee. It prepares you for your mentoring sessions by suggesting appropriate conversation topics, starters and probing questions to use to build a solid foundation for your own mentoring relationships during the first 90 days.
If you’re ready to move your mentoring practices from good to great, you won’t want to miss this opportunity to benchmark your mentoring skills against Cynthia Colson’s best practices.
Starting Strong is available now. You can also enter to win a free audio book copy of Starting Strong: simply retweet here!
by Center for Mentoring Excellence | Jan 12, 2015 | Making Mentoring Work For You, Mentoring Relationships
Starting Strong: A Mentoring Fable provides a view inside six successful mentoring conversations that take place over 90 days. The reader is privy to the thoughts and reflections of both the mentor and mentee, and gets to observe the personal dynamics of a successful mentoring relationship as it unfolds. It’s an excellent training resource because it models how good mentoring should look and feel.
Cynthia is one of the mentors you meet in the book. Cynthia learned the hard way about how to create a successful mentoring partnership. After a few failed mentoring relationships of her own, she grew from the experience. By the time she launched her next relationship, she was savvier and had a clearer understanding of what it takes to achieve tangible results.
As a Program Coordinator, your mentoring pairs can benefit from Cynthia’s wisdom and experience. During the first 90 days of her relationship, she engaged her mentee in six essential conversations that led him to deepened insight and transformation.
What made the difference for Cynthia? What did she do differently that made her more successful? In Starting Strong, you will learn about Cynthia’s strategies for mentoring success:
- Cynthia recognizes that her mentee will be uneasy as the more junior employee, mentored by a senior executive. She takes time to get to know him and put him at ease before launching into the work of mentoring.
- Some key structures and agreements help set the tone and expectations for progress and accountability. The mentee, who is new to mentoring, thought mentoring was an informal drop-in relationship.
- Learning is the purpose and product of mentoring — and its goals drive the learning. Mentors and mentees alike struggle with goal setting. It can be tempting for mentees to pick goals they can easy achieve or that aren’t relevant to their work success.
- Application of skills and learning are a critical part of mentee success.
- Stumbling blocks are inevitable in mentoring relationships. Mentors and mentees need a confidential, safe place to get coaching around issues that surface.
- The 90 day mark is an excellent time to schedule a check-in with mentoring partners.
How have you made the most of your first 90 days of mentoring?
Learn more about how to strengthen your mentoring relationships — order your copy of Starting Strong today.
And don’t forget — enter to win a free audio book copy of Starting Strong. Simply go to Twitter here, and retweet!
by Center for Mentoring Excellence | Jan 12, 2015 | Goal Setting Conversation, Supporting Mentors and Mentees
Starting Strong provides a view inside six successful mentoring conversations that take place over 90 days. The reader is privy to the thoughts and reflections of both the mentor and mentee, and gets to observe the personal dynamics of a successful mentoring relationship as it unfolds. It’s an excellent training resource because it models how good mentoring should look and feel.
Cynthia is one of the mentors you meet in the book. She is an experienced mentor who is committed to her own growth and development as a mentor and the growth and development her mentees.
The story of Cynthia and her Gen-Y mentee unfolds over 90 days (six mentoring meetings) and you get to sit in on each of them. You will hear their private thoughts before, during and after their meetings. At the end of each chapter, you will find questions to prompt personal reflection and spark conversation about the chapter content.
Cynthia learned the hard way about how to create a successful mentoring partnership. After a few failed mentoring relationships of her own, she grew from the experience. By the time she launched her next relationship, she was savvier and had a clearer understanding of what it takes to achieve tangible results.
What made the difference for Cynthia? What did she do differently that made her more successful?
In Starting Strong, you will learn about Cynthia’s strategies for mentoring success:
- Cynthia recognizes that her mentee will be uneasy as the more junior employee, mentored by a senior executive. She takes time to get to know him and put him at ease before launching into the work of mentoring.
- Some key structures and agreements help set the tone and expectations for progress and accountability. The mentee, who is new to mentoring, thought mentoring was an informal drop-in relationship.
- Learning is the purpose and product of mentoring — and its goals drive the learning. Mentors and mentees alike struggle with goal setting. It can be tempting for mentees to pick goals they can easy achieve or that aren’t relevant to their work success.
- Application of skills and learning are a critical part of mentee success.
- Stumbling blocks are inevitable in mentoring relationships. Mentors and mentees need a confidential, safe place to get coaching around issues that surface.
- The 90-day mark is an excellent time to schedule a check-in with mentoring partners.
The conversation playbook guides you so that you can engage in parallel conversation with Cynthia and her mentee. It prepares you for your mentoring sessions by suggesting appropriate conversation topics, starters and probing questions to use to build a solid foundation for your own mentoring relationships during the first 90 days.
Whether you read the book or listen to the audible.com version, there is plenty to talk about. Start the new year and get a book group conversation started.
by Center for Mentoring Excellence | Jan 9, 2015 | Mentoring Relationships, Mentoring Training
Are you from Gen X or Y, anxious to advance your career?
Are you eager make a mark in your organization?
Are you committed to orchestrating your own future?
If you’ve answered “yes” to any of these questions, you will need good mentors if you’re going to be successful.
In our new book, Starting Strong: A Mentoring Fable, you have the opportunity to observe mentoring at work and learn valuable lessons from an experienced mentor about what makes a mentoring relationship successful.
Cynthia, a talented and successful VP of Marketing and Communications agrees to mentor Rafa, a Gen Y financial analyst. Cynthia enjoys mentoring talented, ambitious employees, but only when she is sure that her time investment will truly make a difference.
Rafa is new to mentoring and doesn’t know what to do or what to expect. In retrospect, he realizes that he had a lot to learn about mentoring. The truth of the matter is, most mentees, like Rafa, would like to come to mentoring better prepared.
In Starting Strong, you soon discover just how important the first 90 days are to laying the groundwork for a productive and successful mentoring relationship and what you can do to prepare yourself so that your mentoring relationship starts out and stays strong.
Here’s a sneak peek at some of the success strategies you will find in our book:
- Get to know your mentor and help them get to know you.
- Do you feel comfortable being honest and open about your strengths and weaknesses?
- Establish agreements that define your relationship and clarify your expectations.
- How often will you meet?
- What is your understanding about confidentiality?
- Who will set the agenda for your meetings?
- Articulate the goals that will be the focus of your relationship.
- Are they SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely) enough to produce tangible results?
- Identify specific learning opportunities that will encourage you to stretch and grow.
- Are you playing it safe, or are you being pushed out of your comfort zone?
- Check in on progress after 90 days.
- What is working?
- What could be better?
- Are you getting the support you need?
- What else are you looking for?
To learn more about what you can do to get your relationship started on the right foot, order your copy of Starting Strong today.
You can also enter to win a free audio book copy of Starting Strong. Simply go to Twitter here, and retweet!
