It takes more than common sense to be a good mentor. Research shows that mentors and mentees who form and manage successful mentoring partnerships have a number of skills that make it possible for learning and change to happen. This strategy booklet talks about these skills and gives you a way to check how well you are doing on each one.
Below are few things mentors need to know as they begin their mentorship journey as indicated by some top-notch mentors.
1. Get your mentee to step back and see the why.
For almost any situation that her mentee brings her, Anabel Lippincott Paksoy likes to go back to the beginning.
Paksoy used to be an advisor to the Assembly (and she previously served as a people ops pro at both Twitter and Opendoor). Her answer: “I love to think about why a certain problem or situation came up in the first place.” I want to know why you are working on this product or program. What is the reason for your company? It’s a big deal to the founder. Putting a problem in the perspective of the people around you can help you be more empathic and come up with better ideas for how to solve it.
2. Dig deeper when your mentee looks stumped.
While some mentees come to every meeting with a long list of problems they need help with, others are more likely to slack off and need a little more persuasion to open up.
Mentees often don’t know what questions to ask their mentors, especially when they don’t have a pressing problem to work on right away. Jan Chong has another great idea for you: “I’ve often found that mentees don’t know what to ask their mentors,” she says. There are some ways a mentee might want to spend our time together. ” In this post, I’ll talk about what I’ve asked my own mentors when I was in their shoes. Or I’ll talk about times when I really wished I had someone more senior to talk to.
3. What’s impeding your learning?
Ibrahim Bashir, the VP of Product at Box and a member of First Round’s Expert Network, says that in his experience, roles are fulfilling because they have the potential and reality of learning, and frustrations come from the lack of, slow pace of, or lower quality of that learning. Bashir, who worked for Amazon and is now a member of First Round’s Expert Network, says that he learned a lot about launch strategy there.
“I try to figure out what people thought they’d get out of a job when they took it, and what has changed that keeps them interested.” In an effort to figure out if the problem is part of a bigger one, or if it’s a one-time thing, and what has been done before to try to fix it, he says.
4. Let’s get down to business – what is the situation and what are your limitations?
As of this fall, Emma Schwartz has become a mentor on the Fast Track. She has been a great addition. Schwartz is the VP of Product at Meetup, which was bought by WeWork in 2017. Before that, he was a product manager at Shutterstock and Axios. He has a lot of experience building product teams and mentoring women in tech.
And her favourite way to help her mentees is to ask questions that help her figure out what their problems are and how she can help them, making sure they leave with something tangible that they didn’t have before they came. “Whether it’s changing to a deck or a list of tactics, I want them to feel like they learned something they can use right away,” she says. That goal will require her to do some work in the beginning.
5. What else is on your mind?
JA lot of things happen at once for Jules Walter. He leads Slack’s growth and monetization team. He also angel invests, is president and co-founder of CodePath.org, and helps out as a mentor on the Fast Track. In the last hat he wears, he asks this simple-yet-powerful question to get to know the people he’s mentoring.
Mentees don’t always say what bothers them the most when they have a problem, but rather what they think is OK to say, he says. To help them, say, “Encourage them to talk about more difficult things.”
6. What exactly do you require right now?
Sally Carson is a good team builder and a good teacher. And she asks this question to make sure she’s giving the right kind of advice as a teacher or a friend.
There are a lot of different ways that a mentor can help you, such as championing, mirroring, coaching, or advising you on how to do something. Often, our mentees don’t want us to give them advice based on what we’ve learned. Some people might say to her, “Keep going, you can do this!” Carson thinks that might be what she needs.
7. Develop your management abilities and treat mentees as teammates..
Flatiron’s Cat Miller gave another piece of advice: think of mentorship as a chance to practice the coaching skills that managers need to be good at. Try to treat it the same way you would treat a direct report. In some ways, it’s easier because you don’t have any previous knowledge or biases about the person you’re mentoring, not the person you’re in charge of, she says. Those things make it more natural for managers to ask coaching and clarifying questions, which helps them be better at their jobs.
No surprise that Sue Choe’s best advice for mentoring people was to use her management skills and treat a mentee like another member of the team. “I push them where they need it.” Where they need help, I try to help. Petal’s Chief People Officer and former head of people at Venmo says that when people don’t know enough about a subject, he shares everything he knows about it.
8. Give the gift of confidence and validation.
The next time we asked Jan Chong for her best advice on how to be a good mentor, she told us this: People usually have a sense of what they should do to solve a problem, but they don’t have the confidence because it’s a new situation. You’ll hear a pause in their voice when they talk about what to do next, says the former Senior Engineering Director at Twitter, who used to work there.
Whenever I’m a mentor, I always try to say back to my mentees what I’m hearing them say.” Sometimes, just hearing someone who has been through the same things rephrase things can give you the clarity and confidence you need to move from a half-baked idea to a fully formed plan. You might show them something they’ve been avoiding, but deep down, they already know they need to face.
CEO of Boxed: The VP of Product at Boxed (and former product leader at One Kings Lane and Rent the Runway). Often, people already know how to deal with a situation instinctively and just need someone to validate them, act as a sounding board, and help them improve their strategy, says Chesleigh. “I might also give them a framework to help them think more clearly.” Being a good mentor is all about giving them the tools and confidence in their own methods.
Original Article from: How to Be a Career-Changing Mentor–25 Tips From The Best Mentors We Know
