Mentoring - part 2
Last week’s post described what mentoring is, who can become a mentor and how to pair people into mentoring partnerships. That lays the groundwork for part two where I want to show how we can get the most out of mentoring as a development tool.
I covered a summary of my history with mentoring, both as a mentee and a mentor, in my introduction post. To recap, all the mentoring training I have seen or been exposed to was unhelpful. The reason it is unhelpful is because it focuses on process and outcomes rather than values and connection.
The training tends to follow a common theme: the mentee is the primary beneficiary and therefore should be responsible for all the planning and communications with the mentor. This usually includes initiating the arrangement with a detailed plan of what they want to get out of mentoring. This approach may look good on paper, but if you have no prior experience of mentoring how do you know what you want from it? Mentoring is not coaching or training and this approach doesn’t help establish a mentoring relationship.
In my current mentoring relationship, my mentee started the process in this familiar way. I received an email where they explained their background, what they wanted from mentoring and how it may be beneficial to me as the mentor. We set up an initial meeting over Zoom to ensure that we were a good match (our regular meetings are all virtual as we live in different countries). In that meeting I tried to restrict how much talking I did and explained this by reference to the training that suggests the mentee should speak for 70% of the time. The first meeting included a very stilted conversation where we didn’t stray from the topics of the initial email. In the second meeting I began to loosen up. I realized that the rules I had been taught were too stifling and I couldn’t be my authentic self. By the third meeting I noticed that something had changed on both sides and what has continued since is a relationship that includes an interest in each other as people first and colleagues second.
What do I mean by shifting the focus from process and outcomes to values and connection? If you are asking two individuals, who don’t know each other well, to enter into an open-ended and mutually beneficial relationship, then process and outcomes are largely irrelevant. For such a relationship to work, both parties must be sufficiently empathetic and be able to care about each other. That could be a very narrow focus on caring about each other’s career. I find that overly restrictive and believe it’s easier to care about each other as people.
As stated in last week’s post, the minimum requirement to be a mentor is that you have sufficient experience to draw on. Additional requirements to create a successful mentoring relationship is that you are empathetic and can care about another person’s life and career. The final requirement would be that you have sufficient time to commit.
For a mentee, the only minimum requirement is that you want to be mentored. Implicit in that is you are interested and open to someone else’s point of view. In addition, the mentee also requires empathy and the ability to be able to care about another person’s life and career.
A few general rules are useful to establish. The first is that everything discussed in mentoring meetings should be kept confidential. It’s possible to imagine extreme examples where this rule would need to be relaxed, but these would be very exceptional circumstances.
Another rule or suggestion is that the mentor and mentee do not work too closely with each other. This is because the outcome of a mentoring relationship should not be favoritism, preference or discrimination at work. I am about to enter a mentoring relationship that would seem to blur that line. The mentee is not a direct report but we do work in adjacent teams and their outputs are crucial to some of my projects. How do I square this circle? I revert to the previous rule, nothing that is discussed within that mentoring arrangement will be discussed or disclosed to anyone else and certainly not anyone connected with the mentee. If there was any chance of us being reorganized into the same team I would formally end the mentoring part of our relationship with the suggestion of an alternative mentor. Just to be explicit on this point, if I was asked for feedback on my mentee by their line manager, I would limit that feedback to include only my observations and experiences working with them. I would not point out strengths and weaknesses that have been explored during our mentoring meetings.
Having stripped away the structure from the training, what direction should people move in when they start a mentoring relationship? That is completely up to you. My mentoring discussions have become my most enjoyable meetings because they are free-wheeling, unstructured regular catch-ups. We discuss a very broad range of subjects. It could be a recent event at work or in the news, it could be a personal event, it could be our effectiveness in specific situations or on projects, recent books we have read and any thoughts that they have triggered, interpreting feedback and appraisals, successes and set-backs, philosophies on work and life. We will start in one spot and organically meander through a range of topics until an hour is up. Each idea usually provokes further thoughts and discussion. Either one of us can start a topic and if we don’t touch on work, one of us will naturally raise it because we care about how each other is doing. Imagine two friends grabbing coffee. At one point one is going to ask the other, “how are things at work?”.
One more characteristic I want to bring up before we head to the “why” and that is vulnerability. It helps if both the mentor and mentee are comfortable revealing their vulnerabilities. As people who know me will attest, I am a classic over-sharer and an open book. I happily admit to my fears and weaknesses and find huge value thinking about my own mechanisms to improve or compensate for those areas. The mentor does not need to have every answer or be the perfect role model (which doesn’t exist) and there is so much to learn from mistakes, failures and insecurities.
So why is mentoring so beneficial? I believe there are at least three benefits that can be gained from mentoring. Firstly, an external viewpoint is an incredibly powerful way to review and improve your personal performance. If you have a regular appraisals with your manager, then this may be covered, but the confidentiality in a mentoring relationship allows for far more honesty about weaknesses or difficulties because they are removed from any discussion of salary or promotion. It can also be more effective than 360 appraisals, because empathy is at the heart of the mentoring relationship. The mentor isn’t just filling out a form against an arbitrary deadline, they care about you and your career and spend the time required to help you develop.
The same is true for reverse mentoring. The external perspective you get from the mentee can help shape your thoughts and actions. Feedback can be sought from an individual who has no financial incentive to tell you what you want to hear. Provided the relationship is grounded on the ability to speak freely you are getting information that can be difficult to source from elsewhere in an organization.
The second benefit accrues to the business as all the individual performance improvements that come from mentoring should add up to something meaningful across the organization. Management structures are designed to track staff performance and provide on the job training. As the organization grows, these structures aren’t designed to harness all the accumulated experiences and knowledge that exists within the team. Mentoring is one solution to this problem that can be easily scaled. Mentoring enables the organization to extract the maximum value from its most experienced team members for the benefit of less experienced team members whilst lifting performance across the board.
The third benefit is that a scaled mentoring scheme will create numerous personal connections across the business that didn’t exist before. Imagine how powerful these could be for breaking down silos and establishing the company culture across divisions that may not interact on a regular basis. These aren’t levers that can be pulled by management in the traditional sense, but organically they can help accelerate the business towards its goals. If nothing else, an organization that gets this right could have a competitive advantage in securing talent.
The modern workplace is shifting to put a greater focus on performance over results. In other words, how you do something is more important than the outcome, because when you do something well the results usually follow. I want to finish this post with this final consideration. If within an organization there are senior managers of staff that would make bad mentors, isn’t this a performance weakness that could be addressed? There is a very good chance that those managers prioritize results over performance.
That wraps up my thoughts on mentoring. I may return to this topic in a future blog post as I have no doubt my current mentees will continue to help refine my thoughts on mentoring as a topic. I would love to know if these two posts have been helpful and whether I have missed anything. Next week’s post is on improving interview techniques for hiring managers. I am on a mission to stop anyone asking a prospective candidate for their three biggest weaknesses.