ChatGPT – Being a mentor for the first time – Part 1

Becoming a mentor for the first time is an exciting and rewarding experience. It means you have an opportunity to share your knowledge and expertise with someone who is eager to learn from you. While mentoring can be a fulfilling experience, it can also be daunting, especially if you are unsure of how to go about it. In this article, we’ll explore some tips on how to be a successful mentor for the first time.

  1. Understand your role as a mentor

Before embarking on your journey as a mentor, it is essential to understand your role. As a mentor, you are responsible for guiding and supporting your mentee to achieve their goals. You will need to provide them with advice, feedback, and guidance to help them grow and develop. You will also need to be patient, understanding, and willing to listen to their concerns.

  1. Set clear expectations

It is essential to set clear expectations with your mentee from the outset. You should establish what you hope to achieve from the mentoring relationship, and what your mentee wants to get out of it. You should also set clear goals and objectives, and establish a timeline for achieving them. This will help to ensure that you and your mentee are working towards a common goal.

  1. Establish regular communication

Regular communication is key to a successful mentoring relationship. You should establish how often you will meet or communicate with your mentee and stick to this schedule. Regular communication will help you to track progress, provide feedback, and address any issues that may arise.

  1. Be a good listener

One of the most important qualities of a successful mentor is being a good listener. You need to be willing to listen to your mentee’s concerns, questions, and ideas. You should also be willing to give them your undivided attention and provide feedback that is constructive and helpful.

See the rest in the next post…

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

Mentor Resources – No. 3 on The Best Mentoring Blog 2011 list.

Over the past 10 years, Mentor Resources, a San Francisco-based executive and management leadership center, has created and managed partnerships, matching thousands of mentoring pairs to provide growth opportunities for the development of tomorrow’s corporate leaders.

 
The ability to match mentees with appropriate mentors, combined with their training programs, means that their mentees consistently overachieve – most reaching five year goals in only one year. This outcome is largely due to maximized learning and the mental and emotional information transfer by mentors. They invite us to see the world of mentoring through their eyes and they will show us a world that really works.

 

 

Feedback – Yes or No?

I had a good discussion with a coach from Erickson College (http://erickson.edu/) and we disagree on something which is very important for me. Feedback…

At Erickson College they learn that as a coach you should never give feedback – because it will lead the coach to do the same next time.

For me this is so very wrong for what I am thinking and doing as a mentor. I have feedback as one of the five tools to use as a mentor. But of course you have to be careful and discuss more about the feedback and what to bring further.

For my friend, the Erickson College coach, that wasn´t any better, but he understood what I meant . And that is a reminder that there are different methods and possibilities.

And as a mentor or coach is it important to think this trough, and find out what you would do and what suits you as a mentor or coach. There is nothing wrong about feedback, the mentee or coach is the main person her not the tool. Remember that…

Power Dialogues

As a mentor it is important to have the «right» questions in the mentoring session and to become even better at it you can attend a training or a seminar at The Option Institute.

Their seminar «Power Dialogues» is  the fundamentals of their core system for personal change. The Option Process® Dialogue is a non-judgmental, non-directive system of questions designed to enable people to uncover and discard hidden beliefs which fuel emotions of unhappiness and ineffective behaviors. It is a process which people have been using for more than 35 years to overcome life crises large and small.
Additionally, for those of you who are looking to master this technique and begin a fulfilling career helping others, this course is the first step.

Half of the program will focus on helping you to implement the attitude of an Option Process Mentor. (The Mentor is the person asking the questions.) This attitude consists of being incredibly present with the person speaking, totally accepting them and everything they say, not having an agenda for what they think, feel, or decide, and creating a sense of deep caring about the person. Not surprisingly, this attitude, once mastered, has enormous benefits in many aspects of life outside of the Dialogue as well.

The other half of the program will focus on enabling you to grasp the fundamentals of the questioning technique itself. You will have the opportunity to practice doing Dialogues in real time and get feedback and assistance.

In PowerDialogues you will learn to:

Always be equipped for any crisis – yours or someone else’s

Engage a powerful attitude at will where you are unshakably comfortable, relaxed and caring

Be the resource for others that you always wished you could be

Understand yourself much more deeply, and make significant personal changes by unearthing and shifting your own beliefs

Take the first step toward creating a career helping others

You can read more here, at their own we page: http://www.option.org

Train the Mentors

Some mentoring programs simply introduce the mentee for the mentor and leave them to «get on with it».

But people need to know what is expected of them, how to go about it and why it is important and as the coordinater of the program you need to be confident they have the skills for mentoring.

The purpose of training is to enable mentors and mentorees to establish effective relationships. Because it´s not the same to manage people at work and to have a mentee. You have to build a relationship and trust on a short period of time.

And as a mentor you need the right communicating styles and techniques for applying the mentoring process.

No, as Ann Rolfe in Mentoring Works says: Effective mentoring results from a set of attitudes, behaviors, skills and motivation. Training, complemented by ongoing support and follow-up, significantly increases your return on investment. That’s how a mentoring program works.

I always train the mentors in my program and I use my training “The Big Five”, which is the five most important tools/techiques for the mentor to use in the 1-on-1 meetings.

The five tools are:

  1. Active listening
  2. Effective questions
  3. Feedback
  4. Be responsible
  5. Recognition

Under the whole the participants sit two and two and train on the tools. I don´t believe in a training where the trainer talks all the time and the participants sit and takes note. Everything is gone in the minute they walk from there.

So to be a good mentor you must practice, practice and practice…

 

The Norwegian Mentoring Program for youth

Evening Course II is a part of the Norwegian Mentor program (www.mentorprogrammet.no) facilitating the transfer of experience between the mentors and mentee.

The participants will receive training in practical tool that both could be useful in the mentor role, and in the work otherwise.

There will be room to discuss the management challenges and issues that have emerged along with the adept.

AND there will be revealed a new mentoring tool – The MENTOR Tool.

This will be fun, a lot of the mentors have I trained several times so they are getting better and better. BUT, there is always something to learn.

 

Best Mentoring Blog 2011

DO YOU HAVE SOME CANDIDATES?

I want to put mentoring even more on the agenda and how implement it to peoples personal development and also for companies development.

I have been working with mentoring for over 10 years both in Norway and outside in other countries. My experience is both from universities and companies, and in the start I had mentoring programs together with Junior Chamber International (where I am a senator, it´s to honor the achievements of an outstanding Member for my dedication and contributions to JCI) and Junior Achievement.

I am looking for the 25 best mentoring blogs for 2011. I have been reading a lot at your blog and find it to be one of the candidates for «Best Mentoring Blog 2011».

Some of the criteria are: Most useful information about mentoring, best on mentoring tools and easiest tools to implement in every days life.

GROW-model of mentoring

To support the information on managing the mentoring process, the following GROW model can be used to develop a practical approach to the mentoring session.

The model will help the mentor prepare for the session, and will provide a useful structure to the discussion. A number of questions have been provided at each stage of the model,
however they are suggested questions only, and it is important to adapt them to your own style to ensure an effective mentoring session. Each mentoring session should work through each part of the GROW process.

The GROW mentoring model will help the mentee to identify career goals, and options to move towards their goal, and importantly to discuss what might need to change to
allow this to occur.

GOALS – REALITY – OPTIONS – WRAP UP

Do you use this tool or maybe you have another tool you use. Please shear them with us.