According to a recent study, the supply-demand imbalance is severe: while more than 75% of professional men and women want to have a mentor, only 17% have one. What’s more, most of the people currently acting as mentors aren’t having as dramatic an impact as they could because they’re too narrowly focused on career advancement.
Mentoring the whole person takes more effort, more time, and more thought. Here are some practices for doing it well:
Share your stories.
When I meet with a younger person for the first time, I say: “Tell me your story. Start at the beginning and take your time — 20 or 30 minutes. I may ask a few questions, and everything you say will be confidential between us. Then, when you’re finished, I’ll tell you my story if you want me to.” (They always do.) This simple exercise can transform the trajectory of a mentoring relationship because it shows that you’re truly interested in understanding your mentee and his or her journey, not just in dispensing professional advice. It gives you knowledge of the person’s past which enables you to make more probing inquiries over time. When I tell my story, I make sure to describe one or two of the difficult chapters in both my career and personal life. This signals that all aspects of our lives are on the table.
Ask great questions.
Effective mentors develop a storehouse of probing questions on any number of subjects. Examples include:
What keeps you up at night?
Can you see yourself being stimulated and fulfilled on your current career path for the next five years?
What do you do to “reboot” so that the busyness and tech overload in your life does not result in burnout?
Who has been most influential in your life?
What did you love doing in high school?
What would you have done differently in your life if you had the chance?
Start with the end in mind.
Perhaps the most important question you can ask a mentee is: How do you personally define long-term success? A simple yet effective way to unpack this question for a mentee is to say: “Imagine that tonight there is a party honoring you on your 80th birthday. Write down five brief things you would like family and close friends to say about you.” Once they share their list with me, I normally share my own answer to this question. If you don’t do this early on in your mentoring conversations, it is like sailing a ship without the ultimate destination in mind and you’ll find that it is possible to give a mentee good career advice that is poor life advice. For example, a seasoned lawyer advising a new associate fresh out of law school how to climb the ladder to partner, might tell him or her to work 70-80 hour weeks on a consistent basis. But the senior person hasn’t asked about relationships, kids, health, etc., which could, for the junior, be more important than career and financial success. An added benefit of spending most of your time asking questions is that it prevents you from talking too much and providing too many solutions.
Unpack your mentee’s “toolkit.”
A valuable area to explore is your mentee’s innate gifts, aptitudes, personality characteristics, and passions. Most younger people have limited self-awareness about how they are uniquely “wired.” Without this perspective it is easy for them to aspire to be people they are not built to be. My strong suit was developing relationships with the decision-makers of our corporate prospects and clients. As my success grew in this area, I was asked to manage a growing number of people in our group as well. I discovered over time that this was a burdensome drain on my energy, while working with clients was energizing and a welcome challenge. Once I was able to reorient my responsibilities back to my natural strengths, my career satisfaction returned. Ask your mentees to take advantage of personal assessment tools such as StrengthsFinder, Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram personality assessment, and Johnson O’Connor’s aptitude tests.
Remember that most of mentoring is “caught not taught.”
We have all heard that roughly 90% of communication is non-verbal. Many mentors don’t realize that their lasting imprint on a mentee is often how they conduct their life, whether at work, home, or other settings. How you serve as a role model is as important as your face-to-face meetings. I was fortunate to have a college tennis coach who for four years was a role model and mentor. One teammate describes how he “inspired me every day we were together with his demeanor and how he handled life.” I’ll always remember the time when we were about to play two opponents known for making bad line calls. Our coach told us to take the high road and not retaliate – “kill them with kindness.” I have quoted him many times in many contexts.
Of all the ways you can spend your time, mentoring has one of the highest returns on investment. It enables you to take everything you have learned and “pay it forward,” shaping the next generation of leaders. As Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen puts it, “The only metrics that will truly matter to my life are the individuals whom I have been able to help, one by one, to become better people.”
By mentoring the whole person and not limiting your conversations to career matters, you will have even greater impact and will be felt by your mentees — and everyone they influence — for years to come.
Source : Some extracts taken from the article written by Rick Woolworth is co-founder and president of Telemachus, a non-profit with a mission of mentoring emerging leaders.