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By Rik Nemanick, Ph.D. Up until this point, most of the Rules of Mentoring have focused on building trust with a protégé and exploring Hands, Head, and Heart issues. As you saw in the last post (Rule #5: Balance Empathy and Action), the power of mentoring is realized when the protégé begins to take action based on …
By Rik Nemanick, Ph.D. As trust grows between a mentor and a protégé, the mentor will notice a change in the types of issues the protégé wants to discuss. The issues often become more complex, demanding, or recurring. Because of their more challenging nature, they usually also are more emotionally charged. In fact, this change …
by Rik Nemanick, Ph.D. Often when we think of mentors, we think of people who dispense wise advice. After all, your mentor is someone who has more experience than you and can give you guidance on what to do. Many mentoring partnerships begin with a piece of sound advice that helps establish a mentor’s credibility. …
by Rik Nemanick, Ph.D. Many mentors think their primary job is to give advice to their protégés. While advice can be an important tool of mentoring (although not as powerful as asking questions as we’ll see in the next rule of mentoring), the mentors that are most successful focus on building trust with a protégé. …
The old aphorism, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink,” is the foundation of the second rule of mentoring. Many a mentor has fallen into the subtle trap of driving the mentoring process, only to reach a point of disappointment and frustration when the protégé’s energy and enthusiasm begins …
by Rik Nemanick, Ph.D. One of the things that separates mentoring from coaching is the time scale in which the two operate. Coaching tends to be focused on the here and now, closing immediate gaps and accomplishing short term goals. Mentoring is focused on the long term, the protégé’s journey that may last years. Understanding …
by Rik Nemanick, Ph.D. It has been eleven years since I started working on my first mentoring program at Anheuser-Busch. It was a modest program (twelve mentoring pairs) for the IT organization, and it started me on a course of learning more about mentoring. Over that time, I have trained over 2,000 mentors and have observed …
It is with great honour I represent our guestblogger Rik Nemanick, from The Leadership Effect. You will in the following weeks get blogposts about the rules of mentoring. Ph. D. Rik Nemanick has spent more than 10 years helping organizations get more out of their mentoring programs by focusing mentoring where it will have the …