Mentees, why do you wish to have a mentor? What do you wish to learn and achieve for yourself?
And mentors, what do you see as potential learning opportunities from taking on the mentor role? What can you learn that will be beneficial for you in your daily job and your career?
At work, we usually have specific performance goals. These are SMARTE goals – Specific, Measurable, Accepted & Attractive, Realistic, Timebound and Energy-filled. However, mentoring is a learning journey where you should be careful about goalsetting. If your goals for learning are too “SMARTE”, they can become narrow and restrictive, and you may miss out on surprising and valuable learning that comes from exploring new avenues of career and personal development that you had not thought of before.
Remember: You don’t know, what you don’t know! That is what makes mentoring a learning journey and an adventure where you explore, go outside your normal comfort zone, and let yourself be challenged to find new insights about yourself and even identify talents you did not realize that you have.
SMART learning goals – pros and cons
When you set SMARTE learning goals, they will help you focus your efforts, and you will clearly be able to see that you have achieved your goal. It will probably be easier for you and your mentor to collaborate on your SMARTE goals, but the risk is that you and your mentor will start “solving your challenge” and forget to challenge whether you are focusing on the right goal. It may very well be a good and relevant goal for you to focus on, but you may need to adapt the goal, the deadline for achieving the goal, or whether there is something else you should be working on before you focus on this SMARTE goal etc.
Quality checking that the goal is good and relevant should always be the first step when you have a SMARTE learning goal for your mentoring – this means that the Coach and the Discussion Partner roles are both relevant to explore and challenge your SMARTE goals and your reasoning behind these goals.
Learning themes – pros and cons
When you set a direction for your mentoring, you set a frame around your mentoring collaboration, that will help you focus on topics that can be helpful for your learning. It may be that you will start discussing topics that you thought were not relevant to your learning theme, and suddenly you realize that this topic is adding a new dimension or a new perspective to your learning theme, and you may very well adjust your learning theme accordingly.
Again remember: You don’t know, what you don’t know! Setting a learning direction and a learning theme will guide you and let you explore new roads that you have not explored yet.
This also means that having learning themes is a starting point for the mentoring, and through the mentoring you may end up with a specific goal at the end of the mentoring programme – a goal that you could not have foreseen for yourself at the beginning of the mentoring.
Learning themes tend to be longer term and broader for example focusing on career development, and reflections around learning direction and career moves appear to be as important, if not more important than specific actions towards achieving a specific goal (Clutterbuck, 2011). This means that learning themes are less about a specific goal you already have, and more about clarifying for yourself and finding your goals.
Examples of learning themes are – and you can have several that you wish to focus on with your mentor:
- I wish to clarify what my career options are and what I need to learn to progress in my career. I believe that I should be looking for opportunities to take on a leadership role, but I don’t know how to position myself for such a role.
- I wish to build my network within the organisation to gain information and knowledge that can make me successful in my job and my career.
Even with these kinds of learning themes, you should consider with your mentor and decide what success will look like. Start working on your learning themes and gradually transform them into SMARTE goals. This means that the mentor always will start with the Coach role to help explore, understand, and identify the experiences, emotions, and ambitions behind the learning theme.
