Relationship Mentoring That Works: Six Key Ingredients

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

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

Many times, mentors and mentees/protégés get together and fail to get the most out of their mentoring relationship. This article provides seven key areas that 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 from the mentoring relationship. Both mentors and mentees can benefit from doing some background work and thinking about what they want to get out of the mentoring relationship. It is often thought that the mentee earns more, but in successful mentoring relationships it points 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, ideas, stories) What are my expectations?

2. Set clear limits. It is important to set clear boundaries for the relationship and mentoring conversations. How often are you going to meet? When? Where? How can you be contacted and what time of day or night? It’s amazing how some of the snags mentoring relationships encounter are caused by a lack of clarity around boundaries.

Questions to consider are: What do I see as my role? What are my expectations? What areas does the tutoring cover? What are my limits around meetings? (Time, location, frequency) When and how do I want to be contacted (email, phone) What is a middle ground for the two?

3. Create meaningful and relevant goals. Spend time during the first meeting for the mentee to identify her goals for the mentoring relationship. What do they want from the conversations? Whenever possible, encourage the trainee to create SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) goals. Throughout your conversations, reference these goals and check the progress the mentee is making on them.

Four. Create a mentoring roadmap. Having an agenda, or road map, of where you want your conversations to go will help maximize the time you have together. You can also avoid the awkward silence of “What do we want to talk about today?”

Based on the learner’s objectives, it will be beneficial to identify various topics on which the learner wants information. Schedule these topics in the meetings you have assigned. For example, meeting two can focus on industry trends, meeting three on time management, meeting four on key lessons learned, and meeting five can focus on technical issues.

5. go ahead. Successful mentoring relationships are built on trust and open communication. Follow up is an important part of trust. Follow through works both ways. As a protégé, what have you agreed to follow up on? What action steps have you indicated you will be responsible for? As a mentor, what should you follow up on? What information, resources or contacts have you indicated you will provide?

6. Sign up on the go. It can be very helpful to check along the way to see how the mentoring conversations are going and make any necessary adjustments.

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 to both mentors and protégés, leading to a stronger relationship.