Mentoring!

Tuesday 24^th August 2010

Hi, I’m gurugeoffrey

I want to talk to you today about mentoring.

A mentor is a role-model and a guide; a Mentor has been there before. They are generally ahead of the game; they have a tremendous amount of experience and knowledge about many subjects.

So when they Mentor someone, they are being a role-model to that person, [to their Mentee] they guide someone, they support and they can do it; Why? Because they, very often have already faced the challenges or problems before; they have often hit the same brick-walls as their mentee is facing. So they are able to offer solutions that the Mentee can look into and if they decide to they can use it in their own creative way.

It’s very important for both the Mentor and the Mentee to learn and grow their selves because in the period of time they will spend together, a bond of mutual trust will be drawn up, very often without either party realising it. The Mentor will generally pass on their wisdom, experiences and knowledge to the Mentee who is following them.

It’s important for the Mentor to act as a channel for feedback, for very often information and knowledge that the Mentee has received will be passed back to the Mentor themselves. Remember mentoring is a two-way-street, so the basic process is one of synergy between the two parties.

Something that should always be remembered is that the Mentee will always hang on to every word, every nuance and saying and will act blindly to how the Mentor does things and says them. So, as a Mentor it’s very important that what is passed over to the Mentee is of quality and should be practical. The solutions offered will, more than likely be from anecdotal experiences; so therefore, should be something that the Mentee will actually be able to accomplish themselves, certainly not something that is off the “top-of-the-head” of the Mentor and impractical for the Mentee to do!

A Mentor needs at all times to be honest with the Mentee; if they don’t have a solution, there and then, they should always say so. What should never happen is for the Mentee to try something that doesn’t work and then come back disillusioned. The Mentee needs to have total faith and trust in their Mentor; once this trust is broken, it’s not easy to repair. So what I’m saying is that the Mentor should only give information which is true, factual and from their own depth of knowledge and understanding.

A good Mentor will always tell you honestly; “I don’t know the answer to that so I’ll have to come back to you when I have more information”. What a Mentor should never do is to give a solution that’s way-out and impractical. It’s very, very important to say “I don’t know”, to be honest; more respect is built-up when those words are said.

As a Mentor and role-model to the Mentee a great responsibility is laid on the shoulders of a Mentor because one day the Mentee themselves may well become a Mentor; so the quality of the mentoring becomes the benchmark. The Mentee therefore will only pass out what they have learned from their own Mentor.

So if the benchmark is lowered, then the quality passed out will also be lowered and reduced, so it’s very important for the Mentor to stress and to act at all time with honesty and integrity and therefore to be able to receive and accept feedback and to learn and grow as an individual; which of course is passed on to their Mentees.

Now with mentoring and role-modelling there are going to be times when the Mentee could work faster, so if it happens, it’s very important to have established a good line of communication and to be able to communicate effectively; that’s why I tend to use Skype for most of my first-line communications. A quality Mentor must always be there and if not, must reply promptly to all types of communication e.g. e-mails, phone calls and any other form of contact, otherwise the Mentee could lose faith in the Mentor.

A Mentor has a great deal of responsibility to the Mentee. However, on the other hand you can’t afford to have the Mentee totally dependent, because they will then become far too reliant on the Mentor, which is not what it’s all about, Is it?