| Making the Most of Mentoring
By Anne Stuart
If you're like most professionals, it's a safe bet that, somewhere along the way, you had a significant mentor. Or maybe you've had multiple mentors–formal and informal, temporary and ongoing–throughout your career.
In any case, it's likely that at least one trusted advisor played a key role in your success–and that you're now ready to provide the same kind of guidance to someone else.
The good news: You don't need to be among a company's permanent employees to mentor a promising colleague. As long as you've got the correct professional experience and the right mix of traits (see “What Makes a Mentor?” you can do the job equally well as a consultant, especially in a long-term assignment.
In fact, by mentoring a client's up-and-coming employees, you're giving that firm a tremendous gift: the chance to keep benefiting from your insights and expertise after you've moved on. “Mentoring goes beyond just handing the client a plan to follow,” says Amy Langer, CPA and founding partner of Salo LLC, a Minneapolis-based financial-services staffing company. “It means being immersed in their environment, working with their current staff–and then leaving that knowledge behind.”
But the biggest beneficiaries, of course, are your “mentees,” or protégés–the select few who directly receive the bulk of your insights and advice. If you do the job right, you can literally change your protégés' lives–and perhaps your own as well.
In defining mentoring, it's easiest to start with what it isn't.
Mentoring isn't teaching–although learning is certainly involved–because mentors function more as guides than instructors. As Lois J. Zachary, president of Leadership Development Services LLC, a Phoenix-based consulting firm, puts it: “It's more than just pouring knowledge into someone's head.”
It's also not career counseling. And it's not coaching, because coaches are typically outsiders hired temporarily to work intensively with employees to improve specific skills. Mentors, in contrast, take a longer-term, big-picture approach to helping less-experienced colleagues grow in their careers.
So what exactly does mentoring involve? “It's really a reciprocal learning relationship in which both parties agree to a partnership,” says Zachary, who is also author of The Mentor's Guide: Facilitating Effective Learning Relationships (Jossey-Bass, 2000). “They work toward achieving mutually defined goals that develop the mentee's skills, abilities and thinking, and there's mutual accountability.”
For instance, as a senior financial executive mentoring a midlevel accounting manager, you might encourage your protégé to hammer out a specific goal, such as moving into a more strategic business role. Then you might recommend books, classes or conferences, or perhaps facilitate some networking lunches with professionals in your protégé's desired field. Meanwhile, you'd meet regularly to discuss your protégé's progress and agree upon the next steps.
Or you might mentor a team leader for the duration of a new project, again building that knowledge into the company. “That way, when the next project comes up, they can do it themselves,” Langer says. Meanwhile, the individual mentoring relationship typically continues after the project ends.
Or you might guide an executive through a critical transition—for instance, drawing on your past experience with public companies to guide a CFO who's taking a company public for the first time, or mentoring a female executive who's suddenly become the highest-ranking woman in her organization.
Sound easy? Think again, says Judith Lindenberger, president of the Lindenberger Group LLC, a Titusville, N.J.-based consulting firm that helps organizations develop mentoring programs. “People say, ‘Mentoring? Oh, I can do that; it can't be that hard,'” Lindenberger says. “And it isn't hard. But you do have to have a plan.”
First up in that plan: making the right match. Whether you're paired with a protégé in an official company mentoring program or find yourself informally moving into the role, look for a good fit in terms of personality, experience and goals, says Lindenberger, who has won national awards for the mentoring programs she has developed.
However, she warns that two other minefields–often overlooked and equally applicable to mentor and protégé–are actually more likely to sabotage a mentoring partnership. Those two factors are:
- Lack of interest. “Both parties have to be willing,” Lindenberger says. If either party is forced to participate–for instance, if a consultant who's already working flat out reluctantly agrees to take on a protégé as well, or if a supervisor brings in a mentor for an under-performing employee as a punitive or probationary measure–the relationship is doomed.
- Lack of time. For mentoring to succeed, both parties must build the effort into their schedules. If the mentor is too busy to return phone calls or the protégé gets too wrapped up in work to complete the recommended career-building assignments, the partnership will fail.
But when the process works, everybody wins. Research indicates that mentors value the experience at least as much – and sometimes more – than their protégés do, Lindenberger says. “People like being experts. They like helping. They like giving back,” she says.
Perhaps that's why so many former protégés – including Lindenberger and Zachary – go on to become mentors themselves.
About the Author
JumpStart contributor Anne Stuart writes frequently about business, workplace and career issues. A former writer and editor for Inc. and CIO magazines and The Associated Press, she is now a freelance writer based in Boston. You can reach her at Anne.S@BeTuitive.com.
Copyright © 2005 BeTuitive Marketing
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