6 Key Ingredients for Mentoring Success

Solid Mentoring Relationships do not just sprout up overnight. In fact, several ingredients can contribute to making a mentoring relationship GREAT.

6 Key Ingredients for Mentoring Success include:

1. Think about what you want out of the mentoring relationship - Both mentors and mentees can gain from doing some pre-work and thinking about what they want out of the mentoring relationship. It's often thought that the mentee gains the most, but in fact, mentors also benefit.

2. Establish clear boundaries - How frequently are you going to meet? When? Where? How can you be contacted and When? It's amazing how some of the snags that mentoring relationships meet are caused by lack of clarity around boundaries.

3. Focus on building your relationship: Spend time in your first meeting talking about how you are going to work together, and what your expectations are for the relationship.

4. Follow through. Follow through works both ways - as a protege what have you committed to following up on? As a mentor, what do you need to follow up on?

5. 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. In your first converstaion it may be beneficial to identify several themes/topics the mentee wants to have insights around.

6. Check In Along the Way - At the end of every mentoring conversation discuss what was useful, what next steps are, and any changes you want to make for the next conversation.

Having worked to support hundreds of mentoring partnerships across industries over the years, I have found that ensuring these six ingredients are present typically make the mentoring relationship that much stronger and more effective and beneficial for all parties involved.

Warm regards,
Jennifer

Jennifer Britton
Potentials Realized
Phone: (416)996-TEAM