Managing Up: What It Is and How to Succeed At It
If you are like most people, you want to look good in front of your boss. (more…)
Using a Coach to Develop Your Full Potential
Many organizations incorporate 360-degree feedback assessment into leadership development programs. (more…)
Differentiating Formal and Informal Mentoring
Organizations need to support and pay attention to informal as well as formal mentoring within their organization. Both are important and critical to employee growth and development.
How do you differentiate the two?
Formal mentoring is commonly associated with the words organized, proscribed, structured, facilitated and supported. While these words describe many mentoring programs, the term itself actually refers to mentoring that is conducted under the umbrella of an organizational entity. Program parameters are defined and include structural and accountability mechanisms. There are programmatic and relationship expectations, requirements for eligibility and program goals and outcomes that give mentoring its formal feel.
Informal mentoring, in contrast, is usually described as unstructured, casual, need-based, and natural. For example, you may have identified someone in whom you see great promise and who could benefit your experience or someone may have approached you and asked you to mentoring them. Informal mentoring relationships can, and often do, run the gamut from casual catch-as-catch-can conversations or situational and information sharing to structured and “formalized” relationships. Each relationship proceeds at its own pace and on its own timetable.
Even in formal mentoring, each relationship structure varies depending on the learning needs and style of the mentoring partners. Once you are inside and working the relationship, it becomes a dance of two or more people coming together in partnership to move learning and development forward. As Huang and Lynch so beautifully capture it, “It is the dance between [] willing and consenting partners, a dance of giving and receiving each other’s gifts.”
Being SMART about SMART Goals
Mentoring relationships are innately goal-centered partnerships. They are indispensable to the work of mentoring. Goals focus the work of mentoring, enable mentee growth and development, and, ultimately, determine the success of the relationship. Setting SMART — specific, measurable, action-oriented, realistic and timely—learning goals is one of the most daunting challenges mentors and mentees face.
Mentees are often reluctant to identify goals that appear too ambitious to a senior leader who, they fear, might not think the mentee capable of that level of achievement. Mentors find themselves tasked with making sure that goals will produce the kinds of tangible results that warrant time and energy and move the organization and mentee forward. Be SMART about helping your mentee set SMART goals! Here are some winning strategies for facilitating a mentee-driven goal setting process.
Are You Uncomfortable Being Open in a Mentoring Relationship?
Letting go of one’s defenses and being truly open with a senior leader is one of the most daunting challenges new mentees face. (more…)
Creating a Climate of Openness: What Mentors Can Do
Part of the mentor’s role is to create a space that encourages a mentee to feel comfortable being open with you (more…)
Matchmaker, Matchmaker Make Me a Match
Every mentee who participates in a mentoring program where matches are made for them hopes that their mentor will be a perfect match.
While some formal programs make the matches for mentees, many solicit mentee input or top choices before the final match is made. Some programs provide support and resources, but leave the sole discretion for mentor selection to the mentee.
The hope for a perfect match springs eternal. Whether you are responsible for pairing mentors and mentees, or looking for a mentor yourself, there are many criteria to consider. In this blog, we highlight four of them. These factors impact how a mentor and mentee relate to each other and affect the long-term success of the relationship.
1. Attitude and Values
Mentees report a greater level of satisfaction from their mentoring relationship when they share similar values and attitudes with their mentor. These points of connection, discovered early in the relationship, help the mentee and mentor bond and develop trust more quickly. Mentors connect more easily with a mentee who shares similar work values and attitudes (i.e. work ethic, focus on organizational benefit). On the flipside, having similar attitudes and values sometimes limits exposure to a diversity of perspectives. If mentor and mentee both share sensitivity to employee feelings, for example, there might not be as much gain in areas of accountability and conflict management.
2. Style
Style is the manner someone uses to influence others and convey information. It is sometimes used as a synonym for “personality.” Style is about “how” someone delivers a message. It is a strong determining factor in how someone is perceived regarding their approachability, intimidation, friendliness, or coolness. Style can play an overly important role in the selection of a mentor. While opposites can attract, that may not be the case at the beginning of a mentoring relationship. Style differences —soft or hard, informal or formal, head v. heart, left-brained or right-brained, optimistic or pessimistic—play out in the way the mentee receives feedback and support.
Similarity in style increases the mentee’s comfort and ease in navigating a new relationship. When the mentor and mentee share similar styles, a preference for analysis and detail, for example, the mentee is more likely to satisfy their mentor’s expectations. On the other hand, differences can produce significant learning for both mentor and mentee. The detailed-oriented, analytical mentee may be served better by a mentor with a more global, big picture perspective. A mentee who is conflict averse may benefit from a relationship with a mentor with a more direct style.
3. Learning Fit
Learning is the purpose of mentoring. It is why people engage in the relationship, what they do while they are in it, and what they want out of. Ultimately it is the learning fit that is important. Is there a match between what the mentee needs/wants to learn and what the mentor has to offer (experience, expertise, etc.)?
Mentors don’t have to be subject matter experts in the area the mentee is focused on, but they do have to understand the goals, challenges and requirements the mentee faces to ensure accountability for results. Recently, a mentor, the director of customer service, helped his mentee, the director of construction, learn how to improve his team’s engagement and ownership. Expertise and experience were aligned with the mentee’s goals and needs, not the mentee’s technical field.
4. Time
Good intention alone does not ensure good mentoring. Even when values, style and learning fit match perfectly, a mentoring relationship can be compromised when the mentor doesn’t have or make the time to commit to the partnership. Mentees look to mentors to act as sounding boards, encourage them to test out ideas, to “be there for them,” and provide a safety net. All of this requires regularly scheduled meetings, ad hoc availability for questions, occasional check-ins and a continuum of feedback. Time is the biggest challenge for busy mentors, but it is the glue that holds the relationship together. Most importantly, it sends an important message to the mentee: YOU matter.
From Our Mailbox
Confidentiality: A Slippery Slope
Does the conversation that occurs between a mentor and mentee necessarily remain confidential during a time when the mentee is being considered for a career move? Or, when a leadership team sits to talk about whether to move someone who has been a mentee, can the mentor add to the conversation from his or her experience with the mentee? Or, is the conversation between the mentor and the mentee always strictly confidential? Do you have any guidelines on this question? (more…)Mentoring Culture Check-In: Are You Minding Your P’s and Q’s?
Creating a mentoring culture is a work in progress. This means you need to be minding your Ps and Qs: continuously monitoring, assessing and enhancing your efforts. If you keep these six Ps in mind – preparation, priority, position, pool, politics and progress – they should enhance your efforts and further help you embed good mentoring practice in your organization. (more…)
4 Frequently Missed Mentoring Opportunities …. And, What You Can Do About Them
Author and missionary William Arthur Ward once said, “Opportunity is often difficult to recognize; we usually expect it to beckon us with beepers and billboards.” While many believe that mentoring opportunities arise organically and in the moment, we believe that effective mentoring programs require continuous optimization of opportunity. Often opportunities are right there in front of us and yet we fail to recognize them or bargain them away, thinking that we will find the time to get to them later. (more…)
Mentoring Resources
