The Dip in the Mentoring Process - By Jennifer Britton

The first decade plus of my career was spent primarily working for Canadian and British humanitarian organizations and the United Nations. It was typical that mentoring was a key part of our team's development, as well as our own leadership development. Whether involved in passing on our skills to other staff happened formally or informally it was part of every day work, given that you might only be in a role for six months or three years.

Today I continue to see how mentoring is transforming organizations. In the last twelve years I've been able to support organizations in financial services, insurance, health care and safety create, and launch their own mentoring programs. It changes conversations, it changes leadership and it changes the culture!

What we often don't talk about in mentoring is the "DIP". Just as in any change process, such as cross-cultural integration when you move locations for work, or change through a coaching process, it's typcial to start off with great gusto in what's commonly known as the "honeymoon" phase. At this point, mentor and protege are raring to go - they can't wait to get started and into dialogue with each other. Goals are clear as is usually the way forward.

AS the meetings progress, some partnerships find an ever evolving spiral of conversation and goal touch points, whereas others drop down into the dip. The dip is a place which sometimes feels like you are spinning your wheels, or not getting traction. Proteges and mentors may feel like mentoring is a waste of time.

In fact, the dip is natural! It's part of the change process.  I've seen the dip throughout my own international assignments, and I've seen it mirrored not in the hundreds, but over more than two decades of work in the intercultural sector, mirrored in the thousands.

The dip can, and does, happen in the mentoring process. What to do if you see it? Here are a few things to consider:
Revisit the goals of the protege?
What have they accomplished?
What do they want to aim for next?
Where might they need recharging?
What will "shake" things up a bit?

You might have noticed there were several other places where we can see the dip - in coaching, global assignments, and any change process. Where have you experienced the dip? What did you do?

Best wishes,
Jennifer

Contact us to discuss your emerging mentor program needs. You can reach us by phone at (517) 231-7606  - Susan in Michigan  or (416)996-8326 - Jennifer in Toronto

The month of January was National Mentoring month. What did you do to celebrate? Mentoring is increasingly becoming a popular modality for capacity and leadership development within organizations.

As someone who has been involved in mentoring for almost 3 decades - either as a mentor, in  running mentoring processes or designing mentoring programs for clients, I have seen dozens of examples of the transformative power of mentoring.

Today's post takes a  look at why mentoring? Why is this a popular, and often overlooked, development modality. 

Here are a few of the reasons you may want to consider adding a mentoring component to your learning and development programs:

• Building bench strength within your succession pool
• Connecting people across the silos of an organization or industry
• Building leadership strength and capacity
• Providing both new and experienced leaders/team members with another sounding board, confidential place to explore options/perspectives/best practices
  
• Little or minimal cost (mostly people's time)

Coaching and mentoring are often talked about in the same breath, with people using the term interchangeably. In fact, there are some important distinctions. Here's a great post from ATD's blog on the differences between mentoring and coaching.

Interested in learning more about how mentoring could support your organization's capacity development? Reach out to myself or Susan Combs for an initial discussion around mentoring and how we could support you through our mentor program development and training services.

Have a great start to your week!

Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Mentor Roadmap(TM) - Business and Leaderhip Mentoring support using a Coach Approach

I have just posted a new article entitled "Mentoring: Essential Elements". Over the last few months Susan has been delivering a number of new mentor training programs for our clients, and these areas have been part of the focus of the initial mentor and mentee training.

You can download a copy of the article here.

Enjoy! Please let us know what your questions are around mentoring and what support you need to create and maintain a top-notch mentoring process in your organization.

Jennifer Britton and Susan Combs
(416)996-8326  or 517-231-7606

Formal and informal mentoring programs are increasingly being viewed as important mechanisms to support leadership development programs, boost succession pools and build talent within organizations at both junior and senior levels.

Mentors can play a key role in helping to provide unique insights around how organizations really operate, key trends in an industry and share practical stories about their own lessons learned from their career.

Many times mentors and mentees/protégés are thrown together and fail to make the most of their mentoring relationship. This article provides seven key areas a mentor and mentee can focus on to create a more focused and impactful relationship.

Six Key Ingredients for Mentoring Success include:

1. Think about what you want out of the mentoring relationship.  Both mentors and mentees can benefit from doing some pre-work and thinking about what they want to get out of the mentoring relationship. It is often thought that the mentee gains the most, but in successful mentoring relationships point to a two-way process where mentors also benefit.

Questions to consider before the first mentoring meeting are: What do I want to get out of the mentoring relationship? What do I bring to the mentoring relationship? (skills, questions, insights, stories) What are my expectations?

2. Establish clear boundaries. It is important to establish clear boundaries for the mentoring relationship and conversations. How frequently are you going to meet? When? Where? How can you be contacted and at what time of day or night? It is amazing how some of the snags that mentoring relationships meet are caused by lack of clarity around boundaries.

Questions to consider are: What do I see as my role? What are my expectations? What areas does the mentoring extend to? What are my boundaries around meetings? (Time, location, frequency) When and how do I want to be contacted (email, phone) What's a middle ground for both of us?

3. Create Meaningful and Relevant Goals.  Spend time during the first meeting having the mentee identify what their goals are for the mentoring relationship. What is it that they want out of the conversations. Wherever possible, encourage the mentee to create SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound). Throughout your conversations refer back to these goals and check in around the progress the mentee is making with them.

4. Create a Mentoring Roadmap. Having an agenda, or a roadmap, of where you want your conversations to go, will help maximize the time you have together. It can also avoid the awkward silence of "What do we want to talk about today?".

Based on the mentees goals, it will be beneficial to identify several themes/topics the mentee wants to gain insights around. Schedule these themes into the meetings you have allocated. For example, meeting two may focus on industry trends, meeting three on time management, meeting four on biggest lessons learned, and meeting five may focus on technical issues.

5. Follow through. Successful mentoring relationships are based on trust and open communication. Follow through is an important part of trust. Follow through works both ways. As a protégé what have you committed to following up on? What action steps have you indicated you will be accountable for? As a mentor, what do you need to follow up on? What information, resources or contacts have you indicated you will provide?

6. Check In Along the Way.  It can be very useful to check in along the way as to how the mentoring conversations are going and make adjustments as necessary.

Three questions to ask at the end of every mentoring conversation are: What was useful about our conversation today? What are your next steps? What will you do/learn/explore before our next conversation? What changes should we make for our next conversation, or what areas do we want to focus on?

Incorporating many of these questions into your planning and mentoring conversations can add impact and benefit for both mentors and protégés, leading to a stronger relationship.


Post by Jennifer Britton, Copyright 2010, originally published at Ezine Articles: Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/5001746

What's the urgency in starting a mentor program?  Too often when we talk to organizations about mentor programs, people can appreciate the value of such a program, but often get sidetracked with other urgent issues.  It reminds me of Stephen Covey's Urgent-Important grid in his 7 Habits book.  Mentor programs seem to be Important-Not Urgent.  They are a great idea for "some day."

Here's a different perspective:  Mentor programs are Important and Urgent.  The demographics tell us that in 15 years one half of the workforce will be Gen Y or Millenials.  Yes, in 15 years, the Boomers are gone.  And they have already begun their exodus. What institutional knowledge will you have lost? What valuable industry lessons or company culture aspects will not be shared?  And what young talent will you also have lost because they did not have a mentor and did not feel like your organization was actively managing their development?  The Gen Y chohort loves mentor programs.  Gen X finds safety in keeping their skills up to date.  Both groups would benefit from a mentor program.

Don't wait until "some day" to start a mentor program.  The urgency is now.  Make sure the wisdom gets passed down.  Make sure you have programs in place now to retain your superstars. Make it Urgent and Important. Start creating your own MentorRoadmap.

Contact us to set up a 30 minute Cartography 101 session to explore how mentoring could support your leadership development, talent management, and succession planning.

Copyright Susan Coombs, 2014. All Rights Reserved