Growing: How to be a good mentor
Mentoring is complex, and like most complex tasks, it’s easy to do okay at it, but hard to do it well. There are two purposes to this article- first, how to do it yourself as a mentor. Second, how to teach others to mentor, because as we discussed elsewhere, mentoring is a common method of how people learn in the workplace, so upskilling your mentors will enhance your organizations’ learning, and build internal competence.
What is mentoring?
Ever asking yourself when writing ‘do people really need to read this?’ obviously I decided on yes, because it’s quite possible we aren’t quite on the same page.
Mentoring is the act of giving guidance, support, and advice to someone with less experience to help them learn, develop skills, or achieve their goals. It’s a verb, it’s action, it something that happens; not all at once, but often in little bits and pieces, little snippets here and there. It’s checking, it’s asking questions, it’s answering with longer answers than the basic information.
What a mentor does
Mentors play an important role in the learning process, as they support and coach people as the get good at complex tasks, because there is a big gap between being told how to do something, and becoming proficient in it. Through discussion, sounding out, discussion, debate, critique and questioning, mentors help mentorees learn through doing.
To give you a different, simplistic way of thinking about it, mentoring occurs in two ways:
Mentoring sessions. This sitting down, talking, discussing, teaching, giving guidance. this does happen, but less than you’d think.
On the fly. Instead of sitting down in structured sessions, this is questions, answers, discussion, checking, ‘should I…’ queries. Mentoring is both being available to answer and discuss, but also taking the time to give the long answer- the whys, the why nots, the reasons and details behind the answer, as well as the answer.
What the mentor should do
There a significant amount of literature on this, and significant avenues that we could explore, from how human learn, how adults learn, how to best to teach and so forth, so please remember we are doing the barest of skims across the top here. The key point is mentors are trying to teach them to fish, and the best way to learn is by them doing, not by the mentor showing.
Humans learn complex tasks by doing, and not very well by observing (I’d be an amazing athlete by now if watching was enough). Mentoring is about letting others learn by doing and providing them guidance as they doing.
Key skills for mentors
There are many skills that make people good mentors, here are some of the key ones;
Listening skills- active and passive. You need to be able to both wait for them to explain, and coax out their logic and rationale.
Flexibility. Everyone has their style, and everyone develops their own style that matches their personality and temperament. It’s unlikely that the mentoree’s style will match perfectly with that of the mentor, so a mentor with expectations that things can only be done their way is limitation on their capability as a mentor.
Constructive honest feedback. A key part of mentoring is giving corrective feedback- identifying errors, knowledge gaps, poor application of logic or misassumptions. Doing this is a manner that is constructive (i.e. is beneficial) is a complex and important skillset.
Build trust. Trust is critical for mentoring because the mentoree needs to be comfortable being vulnerable, needs to know that they can trust the mentor with their errors. Specifically they need to be able to trust that confidentiality will be kept, and that their feelings will be handled with care.
How to give feedback
This is the most important skill, so lets spend a little time on this. People don’t learn without knowing what they did wrong, so feedback is critical to growth. But people are almost hardwired to take feedback personally, so it’s difficult to navigate. Some recommend mandatory positive feedback along with negative feedback (e.g. the feedback sandwich if you’ve ever heard of it), and I don’t disagree, but I do note that forced positive feedback can be pretty obvious and disingenuous.
My quick recommendations are; seek understanding of what they are trying to achieve, identify areas you’re not certain they are quite doing right, and discuss through. By focusing on them explaining what they are trying to do, and how they were trying to do it, they can articulate and explain why, and you can help them with gaps and errors in their process.
When to let them learn from their mistakes
The temptation for many mentors to when (and whether) to allow them to make mistakes. In some circumstances, mentors cannot allow mistakes to occur (e.g. trainee surgeons), but in many, sometimes we need to allow things to happen that we aren’t certain are correct as we see them. This is also a tricky area, but I have two things for consideration. First, it is important for mentors to recognize the difference between a) wrong, and b) not as they would do them. Secondly, every decision comes with risk, and each person has their own risk preferences, and this may be the difference- although it’s an unnecessary and avoidable risk, then that would merit correction.
