Regardless of whether you find a mentor or mentee by yourself, or sign up for a formal mentoring programme, it is important to define a proper framework for the mentoring collaboration. In the following, Kirsten M. Poulsen is sharing 5 tips for how to establish and have a successful mentoring relationship full of learning:
1. Find your match.
Find a mentor/mentee who is not your closest colleague or direct manager. In a mentor/mentee relationship it is important not to have any stake in each other’s daily work.
This way you ensure full confidentiality so you can be as open as possible and not worry about information leaking out in any inappropriate way. Additionally, you should not be matched coming from competing companies, as this may result in other challenges in regard to confidentiality.
And… do find a mentor/mentee that is not too much like yourself. If you do, you will just end up confirming each other in everything you already know and reduce the opportunity for learning. Diversity equals many opportunities for learning.
2. Align your expectations.
Make sure you align your expectations from the start. How many meetings will we plan as part of our mentoring? Which learning themes will we have on the agenda?
How do we define roles and responsibilities? Should we make minutes from our meetings – and who should take notes? When and where will we have our meetings? How long should a meeting last? Shall we have online and/or physical meetings? There are many details to explore to align your expectations and you need to make sure you are aligned to avoid misunderstandings in your collaboration. What is the mentee expecting to learn? What is the mentor’s learning focus? Are also important questions – and if you are not comfortable, both of you, with the expectations, then maybe you should find another match.
3. Invest in your collaboration and learning.
Good mentor/mentee relationships that create lasting learning – and sometimes also a lasting relationship, usually include a minimum of 6 months, often longer.
It will take 2-3 meetings to develop the mentoring relationship enough to dig into topics that are really important. Additionally, as a mentee you need to work on your learning between the meetings. The mentoring conversations are only one part of the learning process, i.e. the part where you reflect together over the mentee’s experiences and results from homework. The mentee’s homework could be observing yourself in new and different situations, to explore potential career paths, to participate in new activities etc. You can gain more inspiration and find mentoring tools from books and online – for example in our online Mentor+Universe™. This way you can gain a deeper insight into your roles and responsibilities and mentoring tools to help you have even more interesting conversations.
4. Come out of the comfort zone.
As mentor as well as for mentee, you need to get out of your comfort zone to learn and grow!
As mentor you can experiment with different mentoring and coaching techniques – e.g. Mentor’s Many Roles. You can provide your mentee with feedback. You can do role plays with the mentee e.g. if mentee would like to rehearse/practice for a job interview or a development talk. You can invite your mentee to a meeting at work and ask mentee for feedback on your behaviour afterwards. Be creative, courageous, and generous in sharing with your mentee.
As mentee, you can start networking with new people, meet new people in other contexts, volunteer at work to participate in a new project or take on the role as project leader, try to communicate differently with a specific colleague with whom you have had a conflict. There are many ways you can experiment and gain new insight into yourself, your talents, and your opportunities.
5. Create a good ending.
If you have followed the first advice, you will have planned the end from the beginning – and it is important to have a positive and formal ending of the mentoring relationship.
Ending the mentoring relationship, does not mean that you will never meet again. It means that you will transition into a different kind of relationship that can be very close or very loose depending on what works for you. However, before you leave each other you need to evaluate, share what you have learned, what you appreciate about each other’s investment in the relationships and say thank you. If you are working in the same company, you will probably meet naturally from time to time and can have a coffee and share what is happening. If you are from different companies – and maybe from different geographical locations – it will demand more of you to maintain even a loose relationship. Talk about what you would like, what is possible and agree on how you will keep in touch. It is also completely ok to agree to make no plans, but just agree to take contact, if you feel like talking together again.
