Mentoring — while a popular buzz word in the halls of corporate America today — is actually a very old concept, referring to a teaching technique previously reserved for the few and the special. However, in response to the fast pace, intense competition and complexities of business, mentors and proteges alike, have significantly diluted the mentoring process into something that lacks the power, impact and effect it once implied.
To reinvigorate your own mentoring program, and plan for its possibilities and limits, it’s critical that you approach the process through a different lens. Let’s start with a basic definition.
Building an impactful mentoring program or being an effective mentor is a delicate dance, more complex than the standard, yet unofficial definition of the term, making mentorship synonymous with brain-dumping information, fixing people, or making connections. While leaders are often fine with the teaching / advising function of mentoring, the true impact is made when the mentor adopts the Indo-European derivation of the word, meaning “to think.”
The best, most enduring gift Mentors can give their proteges is to get them to think. Effective mentors teach, yes, but more importantly, they question and challenge their protoges to deploy the knowledge they’ve gained, see patterns, connect the dots, make inferences and solve problems.
If you’re reading this and your own mentoring relationship or mentorship program appears to lack the power and results you initially imagined, remember that the best, most sustainable, and most applicable learning is experiential. Encourage your leaders in mentoring roles to:
Ask more questions;
– Avoid being overly prescriptive
– Expect the protoge’s interest, commitment and energy to match yours: they will only get out what they put in.
Leave them in action.