Kategori: Mentoring

Articles about mentoring.

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The Mentor´s way Rule #4 – Good Questions Beat Good Advice

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. Over the long run, however, advice can become a trap for a mentor. Mentors who only give advice miss an opportunity to teach a protégé to think for him or herself. It is difficult to build this capability when giving advice. Advice is the end of a conversation; a question is the beginning of one.

As trust grows between a mentor and protégé, their conversations will turn to more complex issues, many of which may be vexing for a protégé. While a protégé may be seeking a simple solution to the problem, there is rarely a silver bullet. Instead, what a protégé needs is a safe place to explore the situation and get another perspective on it. When a mentor asks good questions, the protégé is asked to step out of the situation and examine it from a distance. This process of exploration helps a protégé find alternatives that she hasn’t considered yet or find a new way to approach the problem.

Questions also help a mentor keep from treating symptoms of the issue. Often the protégé is raising an issue that is a symptom of a larger issue. When advice is given before the issue is explored more fully, the protégé may address the surface issue without getting to the root cause.

Just as good advice can establish a mentor’s credibility, it can also erode that credibility. It is easier to give advice on less complex issues. For instance, you may share a few of your time management techniques with a protégé who is struggling under the weight of his commitments. That advice establishes you as someone who can help with his or her issues. Over time, however, your protégé may trust you with more complex issues that do not have easy answers. Your protégé may have a hostile relationship with his boss and wants your thoughts on what to do. When you suggest talking with the boss, your protégé says, “I’ve tried that; he doesn’t listen.” With that advice, you may lose some of that trust and credibility you have built. A better question would have been, “What have you tried so far?” and, “What did it sound like when you tried to raise the issue with the boss?” Those questions will get you more mileage than advice.

Finally, questions keep the ownership of the issue and solution with the protégé. If a protégé tries your advice and it fails, she can blame you. On the other hand, if the protégé arrives at a course of action through a conversation driven by good questions, she is more likely to take ownership of the solution and try harder to make the solution work.

There are two basic classes mentors ask. Exploratory questions are meant to get the protégé to describe the situation. You are trying to pull the protégé out of the situation to examine it from a distance. With these questions, you are trying to establish the groundwork:

  • Who is involved in the situation?
  • What is each party’s interest?
  • What is the primary challenge?
  • What constraints does the protégé face?
  • What time constraints are at work?

Through these questions, you can probe the situation and try to understand all of the moving parts. Sometimes, as a protégé answers exploratory questions, she starts working toward solutions. Other times, she needs more of a spark to move her outside her comfort zone.

Catalyst questions try to engage the protégé in deeper thinking about the situation. These questions try to get the protégé to see things from different perspectives, see options beyond their current thinking, or challenge assumptions that are constraining thinking.

Catalyst questions come in many varieties, including the following:

  • Logical: What could have caused that to happen?
  • Enabling: You have mentioned that as a barrier; what could you do to start climbing over or working around that barrier?
  • Comparison: How have others handed similar situations?
  • Contrasting: How is this situation different than one’s you have experienced before?
  • Visionary: What does success look life for you?

While good questions do beat good advice, there are three times when advice makes sense. As mentioned earlier, a mentor can use advice early to establish credibility. Helping with an early issue gets you a small win that can help build trust. Advice can also be used for less complex issues, often closing knowledge gaps a protégé has because he lacks experience. Finally, advice can be used to clear log jams. When a protégé has looked at an issue from many angles and still cannot come up with a course of action, advice can be presented as the first option to consider. Often by hearing that there is someaction the protégé can take frees them to consider other alternatives.

 

Look here for the original blogpost, and to Rik Nemanick´s homepage

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The Mentor´s way Rule #3 – Create a Safe Place

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. Every time I talk to mentors and protégés who had effective and satisfying experiences, they point to the trust that they built as the foundation of their partnership. Trust is the true currency of mentoring; building a “trust account” between a protégé and mentor becomes a powerful platform that can help a protégé grow in many ways:

  • Expressing emotions. All protégés have situations that are laden with emotion. They may be holding onto fear, frustration, anger, or doubts that get bottled up, creating a block to their growth and progress. A mentor who creates a safe place allows these emotions to be expressed without fear of judgment or reprisal. Like a pressure relief valve, expressing the emotions allows the protégé to blow off steam and think more clearly about the situation.
  • Dealing with difficulty. Pent up emotions are usually tied to difficult situations. They get pent up because the protégé doesn’t feel like she or he has anywhere to examine the situation and formulate a strategy for dealing with it. A mentor can provide a third-party perspective because he or she usually doesn’t have a stake in the situation. It is the safe place that allows constructive problem solving to take place.
  • Taking risks. The power of mentoring opens up when a protégé begins to learn. True learning occurs when a protégé moves outside of his comfort zone. If what was comfortable was already working, the situation wouldn’t be causing stress for the protégé. Creating a safe place allows a protégé to try new things and take risks, knowing that he will have someone to support him. A mentor gives a protégé confidence to try new things, helps a protégé cope with setbacks that come with risks, and celebrates with the protégé when the risks pay off.
  • Building the relationship. The trust built between a protégé and mentor pays off over time. The bonds that are built through a trusting partnership may help a protégé today, but they are even more valuable down the road, often when active mentoring has come to an end. The trust capital that a mentor and protégé built in the past creates a reserve that can be tapped when the protégé faces new challenges over time.

Trust grows slowly and naturally over time. There are some things that mentors and protégés can do to both accelerate that growth and protect it from damage:

  1. Get to know the whole person. Many mentoring partnerships draw their boundaries around their professional selves. To find those commonalities that are the seeds of trust, devote time getting to know the whole person. Ask about family, hobbies, interests, and aspirations. I often advise partners in formal programs to spend their second meeting having a meal together and getting to know each other.
  2. Build momentum early. The conventional wisdom holds that mentors and protégés should meet about once a month. That advice works once trust has been built, but works against growing trust more quickly. At the beginning, mentors and protégés are better served by meeting more frequently and building some momentum. Getting into the habit of meeting and discussing issues creates a solid foundation for mentoring more quickly. Meet every other week at the beginning of a partnership, and drop back to monthly after a few months when you feel that trust has grown sufficiently.
  3. Look for small wins. Teresa Amabile has written about how powerful small wins are, creating the energy that fuels progress. Small wins also can help build a relationship in its early stages, creating an emotional bond that cements trust.
  4. Build the mentor’s skills. Trust can erode when working with a mentor who isn’t skilled. As issues become more complex, the solutions become more nuanced. The advice-giving skills that worked for a mentor early on may begin to erode trust, causing a protégé to lose faith in the partnership. Spend time building your mentoring skills by reading articles and books, attending seminars, and seeking your own mentors and learning their craft.
  5. Maintain confidentiality. The quickest way to drain your trust account is to break the confidence of your mentoring partner. Mentors and protégés need to establish early on whether their conversations are confidential, and what limits (if any) there are to that confidentiality. Being explicit up front will open the door to difficult conversations that will rely on the trust that confidentiality brings.
  6. Be patient. Not all of us trust at the same speed. Some of us trust more quickly than others. Recognize that your mentoring partner may not trust as quickly as you do. If you trust more quickly, you may want to slow down and engage in more trust-building behaviors to let your mentoring partner catch up with you. Trust takes time to build, and the investment you make early will pay dividends over time.

 

Look here for the original blogpost, and to Rik Nemanick´s homepage

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The Mentor´s way Rule #2 – Stay Out of the Driver´s Seat

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 to wane. The drive that was there at the beginning starts to give way to other demands in the protégé’s world. For some, the newness of mentoring wears off, sapping some enthusiasm. For others, day-to-day responsibilities begin to take over, and mentoring becomes a luxury the protégé cannot afford. In any case, mentoring meetings become less frequent and tangible progress on mentoring goals slows.

When the drive fades, many mentors see a vacuum that they are tempted to fill. The temptation is palpable, since the mentor is losing the connection that had been built early in the process. They see the progress slowing and want to step in to get it back. There is also a self-esteem component at work: is my protégé losing interest because I’m not a good mentor? Some mentors step into the gap by driving the meeting schedule. Others begin to take over on the protégés goals, giving more advice and taking a more active role in the steps the protégé is taking. Both of these actions can lead to either a protégé disengaging from a mentor entirely or, worse, a protégé being dragged along by an enthusiastic mentor who has taken the wheel.

Unfortunately, driving the mentoring process generally backfires on the most well intentioned mentor. The fact is that mentoring isn’t for everyone at all times. There are some protégés who are attracted to the idea of mentoring, but really don’t have the time to devote to it. They have other pressing issues that take up more of their time and attention, making mentoring a tertiary priority at best. This protégé may start working with a mentor with the best intentions, only to disappear two or three months in, leaving the mentor wondering what went wrong.

There are some simple things a mentor and protégé can do early in the process to help keep the mentor out of the driver’s seat.

  1. Agree on a meeting schedule early in the process and turn over responsibility for the schedule to the protégé.
  2. Let the protégé know the best way to get on your schedule and give her or him permission to book meetings. If you have an administrative assistant, tell him or her that the protégé is allowed priority access to your schedule.
  3. Protect meetings with your protégé. When you have other priorities that compete with your meeting schedule, set a higher bar for what would cause you to reschedule.
  4. Promise to respond to requests from your protégé within a short timeframe (e.g., one or two business days). Too many protégés are left hanging by busy mentors.
  5. Don’t chase the disengaged protégé. If it has been a while since you have met, send a gentle reminder. You can open the door to reconnecting periodically, but don’t start chasing the protégé.

These deceptively simple logistics guidelines will help you transfer ownership of the mentoring process to the protégé, which is where it belongs.

Look here for the original blogpost, and to Rik Nemanick´s homepage

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Mentor´s Way Rule #1 – Chart a Course

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 a protégé’s goals and aspirations will help create a context for more meaningful conversations. Spending the time up front to explore these goals will guide the mentoring interaction, helping the mentor to ask better questions, give better advice, and create an overall direction for the partnership.

One thing mentors learn is that protégés come to mentoring at very different stages of career exploration. Some will approach mentoring with very clear goals for their career (“I want to be the vice president of sales for the company’s South American region in five years”), while others have no idea what is possible for them or where they are going to be in five years. Both of these protégés are on a journey, but they are at different points on different paths. They can both benefit from mentoring, but their mentoring will look very different if their mentors take the time to learn where they are and where they are trying to go.

Below is a brief description of four phases of career exploration. At the beginning of the mentoring process, spend time finding out where your protégé is in terms of these phases to help establish where you want to take mentoring. Use the phase to set a one year mentoring goal that will guide your conversations.

  1. The Explorer. The first phase is the protégé who has a drive for something, he just isn’t sure what he wants. He may not be sure what is possible or where he should take his interests and talents for a satisfying career. For this protégé, the focus of mentoring is on Exploring, looking at the larger map of available career choices and finding out more about the possible destinations. The goal for this protégé is to spend a year exploring and finding a destination that will be satisfying.
  2. The Scout. This protégé has a good idea where she wants to go, but isn’t sure how to get there. She wants her mentor to work with her constructing a plan for the future that will be motivating and achievable. She may need to test out a few different paths to see which one works for her. The Scout’s goal is to spend a year building and testing a plan, perhaps taking the first few steps on the plan by the end of the year.
  3. The Navigator. This protégé enters mentoring with a destination in mind and a plan on how to get there. He wants a mentor to help him test his plan to see if it is sound and realistic. He also wants someone to hold him accountable for making progress down the plan and provide encouragement along the way. The Navigator looks at his path and decides how far down it he and the mentor will get in a year.
  4. The Homesteader. The fourth phase of exploration is the protégé who will be in her current role for the foreseeable future. She may be newer to the role and is just learning it, or may have arrived at role that is a great fit for her current needs. For her, mentoring is about growing within a role, keeping from getting stagnant and complacent. She wants to challenge herself to grow and keep her skills fresh, since she doesn’t know when she might want to start exploring again. Her goal for mentoring is to expand her skills and her roles over the course of the year to ensure she continues to learn and engage.

While these phases are presented as a logical sequence, most protégés do not experience them that way. As they learn and experience more, they change their understanding of where they want to go and what it takes to get there. And, circumstances may change around them that may reshuffle their priorities. A strident navigator may get transferred within her company, derailing her plans and forcing her to reassess her goals and path. An Explorer may spend a year exploring options, only to find that he had the ideal job the whole time and switches to becoming a Homesteader.

Spend the time at the beginning of the process finding out where your protégé is and where he or she wants to go. Then, check in every three to six months to see how things have progressed. After that, enjoy the ride with your protégé. Remember, your protégé is in the driver’s seat.

Look here for the original blogpost, and to Rik Nemanick´s homepage

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The Mentors Way: An introduction to the Eight Rules of Mentoring

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 what works and what doesn’t in mentoring. Over the next few weeks, I am going to share these this learning here.

About two years ago, I took up running. I started running casually with a friend, two to three miles at a time. It wasn’t long before I was signing up for 5k’s and 10k’s, leading to my running two half marathons in 2011. Along the way, I sought out advice and mentoring about running. One piece of advice stuck with me about long distance running was this rule: run within your heart rate. The rule means that if you run too fast at the beginning of the race (pushing your heart rate too high), you won’t have enough energy in the last few miles to keep up your pace. While the rule seems simple, it is a powerful tool when running long distances and gets you into trouble when you break it (as I found out both times).

I have organized my learning about mentoring into rules that are intended to do the same thing: give mentors simple guides for approaching their mentoring partnerships. These rules are written for mentors who are in mentoring partnerships that will last a year or longer. Like a marathon (or, in my case, a half marathon), what you do in the beginning will have an impact later in the relationship. Following these rules early will help mentors establish productive, trusting partnerships that will benefit themselves and their protégés over time.

Here is a preview of the eight rules:

  • Rule 1: Chart a Course. Good mentoring starts with an exploration of where the protégé wants to end up. These goals become the foundation of the partnership.
  • Rule 2: Stay Out of the Driver’s Seat: Mentoring should be led by the protégé. Mentors need to let the protégé know it is her or his job to drive the partnership.
  • Rule 3: Create a Safe Place. Trust is the key to mentoring. Mentors need to focus on developing trust with a protégé so that the true benefits of mentoring can be realized.
  • Rule 4: Good Questions Beat Good Advice. The best mentors challenge us to think. A mentor who only dispenses advice misses opportunities to expand a protégé’s thinking.
  • Rule 5: Balance Empathy and Action. Part of being a trusted advisor is giving the protégé a place to vent frustrations, but not allowing them to consume the protégé. Good mentors find the balance between showing empathy and encouraging the protégé to take action.
  • Rule 6: Create Accountability. One of the hidden powers of mentoring is the accountability that it creates for the protégé to take action. Mentors can create a subtle accountability that encourages action while still offering support.
  • Rule 7: Get Help When Needed. Many potential mentors do not step up to the role because they fear that they have to have all the answers. Great mentors know when to reach out and help a protégé find the answers by tapping into others who can help.
  • Rule 8: Pay Attention to Transitions. Mentoring has a natural life cycle, and there will come a time in most partnerships when the mentor needs to step back and play a less active role with the protégé. Good mentors recognize this transition as a sign of a protégé’s growth and use it as a time of reflection, celebration, and transition.

Over the next few weeks, I will explore each of these rules. I welcome your comments and thoughts on the rules.

See more about Rik Nemanick here

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The Leadership Effect – Guestblogger

 

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 most impact, accelerating the development of mentoring partnerships, and building social capital within and between organizations. He co-founded The Leadership Effect in the United States to help companies identify and develop their leadership talent. He is currently working on a book on his Eight Rules of Mentoring.

Rik is an adjunct faculty member in Saint Louis University’s MBA program and an instructor in Washington University’s Masters of Human Resource Management program. He has given seminars on mentoring and organizational change to various professional organizations and through Washington University’s University College. Rik holds a doctorate in organizational psychology from Saint Louis University.

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Types of Mentoring

The Sodexo 2013 Workplace Trends concludes with different types of mentoring and say that new approaches to mentoring can empower workers to direct their own career development in greater ways. Here are some different types…

Topical mentoring
Topical mentoring leverages both the expertise of leaders and the collaborative experience of other learners. One or more advisors lead numerous learners in conversation, knowledge sharing, and practical application related to a specific learning topic or around a point of affinity. People can find or create learning groups on their own, or organizations can manage the process. People learn from the advisors and from other learners, helping to build deep expertise across the enterprise.

Situational mentoring
Situational mentoring gives individuals a way to address immediate learning needs with one or more advisors. Several people can offer solutions and ideas at the same time so that learners get quickhitting answers on a high-impact issue, problem, challenge, or opportunity within a short amount of time. Learners then synthesize this knowledge into a solution that fits their need and bring that solution back to their job in a timely manner.

Peer mentoring
Peer mentoring connects colleagues at the same hierarchical level in the organization but who may be in different functions or divisions. Learning relationships of this sort are particularly beneficial because peers can be a great source of social support and encouragement. They understand and experience the same organizational pressures based on position in the organization, and can provide breakthrough insight and advice from someone who truly gets it.

Reverse mentoring
Reverse mentoring places those who would typically be considered advisors into the learner role, and those typically considered learners into the advisor role. Reverse mentoring often exposes organizational leaders to new trends in technology, new ideas and innovations, and new perspectives of younger generations, while also bringing bright young minds to the attention of seasoned leaders.

Open mentoring
Open mentoring programs that promote self-directed relationships allow people to address their own learning needs in a manner of their choosing, while still aligning with overall organizational goals. Using technology to facilitate distance mentoring lets people collaborate with one or more mentoring partners on a global basis and allows the programs and mentoring networks to grow organically throughout the entire organization.

 

Both open mentoring programs and reverse mentoring is old news, but interesting enough. I have been in this business over a decade and been doing both reverse mentoring and open mentoring programs and I know they works.

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How did we come to this?

This new mindset around mentoring is not a fad or “flavor of the month” type of HR process; it is an emerging approach to enterprise-wide self-directed development. It is the natural evolution resulting from people’s desire to connect with and learn from others, and the organization’s desire to have a better understanding of the impact and ROI of learning and development processes. It is what both individuals and organizations have been asking for, without really knowing what to call it.

 

Modern mentoring is fast becoming a must-have solution for companies of all sizes. Those organizations that wait too long to make the transition to the modern view of mentoring will find themselves struggling to retain and find talented employees who feel they can grow with the company. 

 

Generational Views on Mentoring Traditionalists (born between 1922 & 1945)
are hardworking, loyal to their organization, and respectful of those in authority. They want learning that is predictable, practical, and delivered by experts. They also need to share their experience and expertise with others to feel valuable.

Baby Boomers (born between 1945 & 1964)
believe in participative management and work hard for personal gain. They want to be involved in learning that has an immediate payoff to their job. They need more help in developing the complex relational skills involved in leadership.

Gen Xers (born between 1965 & 1980)
tend to be skeptical of those in authority and seek a better work/life balance. They are also often fiercely independent and have more of an entrepreneurial spirit. They want learning that is collaborative, peer driven, and relationally balanced. They need help settling on a career path that is both challenging to them and fits the needs of the organization.

Millennials (born between 1981 & 2000)
are hopeful, multi-tasking Web-surfers. They want learning that is on-demand but highly social and network oriented. They need help learning the foundational skills and social awareness needed to be effective in the organizational culture. Due to the exposure and ready access that they have had to information and resources as they have been educated, they don’t have patience for learning processes that take too long.

This is so very interesting and I can´t wait to be a part of the future of mentoring, with more than a decade of experience I am all for the future…

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Tehcnology in modern mentoring

The last blog post from Sodexo´s 2013 Workplace Trends called: Modern Mentoring, some of the big thing was modern technology brought to mentoring. In this blog post I will talk more about the technology.

Technology plays a large role in enabling this to happen because it allows organizations to view mentoring as a “for the masses” practice that harnesses the collective knowledge, skills, abilities and passions of an

organization’s entire workforce. Employees can create their own personal learning and advising networks that grow and flex as their individual needs and strengths change. This adaptability means insights are shared and applied on the job in a just-in-time manner, with people seeing real work results from their mentoring activities.

Adults want to drive their own learning, and as they address their own personal real-time learning needs by connecting with colleagues from anywhere in the organization, they are in control of their learning. These

knowledge-sharing connections help break down silos and spread expertise and innovation quickly across the enterprise, which can spark new solutions and creative ideas among employees that they can then bring to the job.

An ideal mentoring and knowledge-sharing network is:

• 5-15 people

• Learners and advisors come from across functions, locations, generations, etc.

• People shift in and out of the network and of the roles themselves, as learning needs and knowledge strengths evolve, creating a diverse, fluid and dynamic network

 

The diverse networks that people form can help them generate creative solutions, novel ideas, and unique approaches to organizational problems or issues they are facing. In fact, researchers Christoph Lechner, Karolin Frankenberger, and Steven W. Floyd found that among colleagues who are collaborating for work, the more diverse the networks were in terms of values and viewpoints, the more they increased their performance

Tips:

In light of this result, organizations looking to foster and encourage major creative solutions and thinking among workers, as well as innovative improvements in current processes throughout the business, would do well to encourage more diversity in individual learning networks. This type of inclusive knowledge sharing thrives at Sodexo, where they actively support learning connections across generational, geographical and organizational boundaries.

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Sodexo trends

I am so very happy that mentoring is in the trends for 2013, for me that is important. Telling me that mentoring still is important, so important that it is among the other «IMPORTANT TO DO IN 2013».

I am working on mentoring for entrepreneurs and that really is the future. The future for business and the future for personal development.

More on mentoring entrepreneurs is to come, so stay tuned