Got a Good Mentor? Hold Up Your End of the Bargain

Summary:
The relationship between mentoring and learning is not osmosis! As the person being mentored, you need to be involved. Here's how to be an effective mentee.

Why You Want a Mentor

Your End of the Bargain

Be a Good Mentee

What to Talk to Your Mentor About

---

Why You Want a Mentor

"One of the greatest truths about mentoring is that mentees want it. They know that the right mentoring at the right time can make a huge positive difference in their lives, educations, and careers." Is this statement from "What Should I Work On?" true for you? If you have not yet considered why seeking out a good mentor is one of the best decisions you can make in developing your career, you also may not yet realize your active commitment to the relationship is so vital..

Why do you need a mentor? A mentor is a trusted guide, answer wizard, confidante, and champion. Whether you are just completing school, job hunting or beginning to work, there is always some uncharted territory you must navigate.

In school, you may need to explore potential career choices and how to prepare for them. Or you may need guidance about how to make the best of college resources. Or you may need to learn how to network. Or you may need help in making the transition from student to worker.

While you are job hunting, you may need someone to check your resume and cover letters, to help you get your foot in the door or to introduce you to other resources such as a professional organization.

On the job, you will want to adjust to a new corporate culture, learn how best to advance within the company and get feedback on your concerns about the work, a coworker or even your supervisor.

Making the Most of the First Year on the Job" states:

"Mentors are essential at all stages of your career. Your mentor is someone whom you respect and who respects you, who can model good work behaviors and ethical standards, who can serve as your advocate and hold you accountable. While your supervisor is responsible for training you to do your job, your mentor will help you excel at your job."

Everyone of these benefits adds up to a single result: success for you.

In "What a Mentor Can Do for You," I note:

"As a job seeker or worker with a disability, you may especially benefit from a mentor-mentee relationship. Opportunities to learn good work habits may not have been as available to you as they were to others, and a mentor can guide you in quickly developing those habits. You may wish to have just one person you know who can offer you advice so you can avoid looking 'needy' to others. You also may need an extra ally in communicating your progress to a supervisor. There really is no downside to having an effective mentor."

However, just as signing up for a class (or even showing up for class everyday in the hopes of soaking up knowledge by osmosis) is not enough to learn, getting a mentor, even a terrific one, is not even half the battle. You must make the most of your mentor relationship to reap all of its exponential rewards. You are every bit as responsible as your mentor for making the relationship a success.

So you know what an effective mentor does: He listens, offers advice, respects you, helps you find resources, introduces you to useful contacts, and gives you feedback about choices, strategies, and so forth.

But what do you do to hold up your end of the bargain? How do you best use the benefits a mentor can offer?

Go to Top of Page


Your End of the Bargain

Your duty as a mentee is to avoid wasting the mentor's time. That's blunt but it means you must develop, with the mentor, a structure for your relationship.

First, identify why you and your mentor have chosen to work together. I explore this topic more fully in the next section, "What to Talk to Your Mentor About ." Identifying the reason for your relationship will allow you to determine and agree on a focus and a structure for mentoring.

One place to start is right here on eSight Careers Network. See "Articulating Your Life's Purpose." Set a goal. Decide what steps you both need to take to reach it. Explore what activities will help you progress through those steps. Then plan on it.

For example, I may decide I need a mentor to help me explore my journalism career formally. There will be a number of possible steps, including finding a contact at a local newspaper, looking into the different types of journalism (such as investigative and service journalism), and enrolling in a master's degree program.

Considering such alternatives leads to proposing and negotiating the relationship, which is the next step. You and your mentor must agree on what he is willing and able to do, how he will do it (and when), and what aspects of the project will be your responsibility.

In my example, for instance, my mentor and I may decide that she can help me meet people in the industry, allow me to job shadow, help me find suitable courses, and so forth. We just need to decide when and how.

You will be more successful and avoid misunderstandings, if you write the plan down and read through it one last time before proceeding. Include the when, where and how of your regular mentoring sessions.

To make sure your relationship with your mentor remains one of trust and respect, take "no" for an answer. While the relationship, just as in a teacher and student, is about you and your success, your mentor cannot help you if he feels uncomfortable.

One way to start building your relationship is to take some time to find out what you have in common. Spend some time exploring what brought you each to a chosen career, what experiences you've had, what hopes you may share, and what aspects of the field inspire and interest you most.

It may be helpful for you and your mentor to infuse your relationship and structure your mentoring tasks with a little creativity. One-on-one insightful conversations over a cup of coffee may be the standard, but don't let your relationship dry out. The Mentoring Group offers a few ideas to vary the structure and maximize mentoring.

For instance, you might work on a project together. You may want to find exercises that help you explore or structure a topic. Thoreau and other famous teachers liked to teach by pointing to examples in nature. There is no reason you and your mentor cannot use e-mail or even set up a web page to use as a structure for your activities.

Should your mentor also be disabled? There are pros and cons to that question. The benefit of a disabled mentor is that he will not likely have an automatic discomfort with disability or an ignorance about yours. Further, he may already have confronted barriers and overcome them, allowing you to avoid reinventing the wheel. But you may also have trouble finding someone in your field who has a disability, especially the same basic disability you have. It's best to be flexible and prepared to educate.

Go to Top of Page


Be a Good Mentee

Coach Rachelle Disbennett-Lee of True Directions, Inc. offers these tips about how to make sure you get the most out of having a mentor:

"Remember that you are the learner. Be open and willing to learn. Be ready to take direction -- don't push back. Think of your mentor as being on the step above you on a ladder. She has gone ahead of you and cleared the way for you to climb safely.

"When choosing a new mentor, look for someone who has been at the company a while. Choose someone with similar outlook and beliefs to your own. Someone who intrigues you. Most importantly, find someone with integrity and who has your best interests at heart. The relationship won't work otherwise. If your company assigns you a mentor, don't hesitate to ask for a different one if you don't think it's a good match.

"Build some understandings into the relationship when you first meet. Decide what your boundaries will be and what you will do if the two of you disagree."

"Working with a Mentor" lists these qualities of a good mentee: considerate, responsible, respectful, adaptable and proactive. It explains:

"A good mentee carefully thinks out questions to maximize the use of the mentor's time. If the mentee wishes to terminate the relationship, he/she does so courteously and promptly so that another student can take that slot. A good mentee realizes that some communication with the mentor might be professionally sensitive and should not be repeated. A good mentee suggests ways in which he/she can benefit from the relationship."

DO-IT mentor Marq Koontz shares his own observations:

"From both the mentor's and the mentee's point of view, I believe the most important qualities in a student preparing to be mentored are honesty (with one's self and others -- and connected to that an ability to be unafraid of self-examination); being ready and willing to ask questions about anything at all that needs asking...; and passion. If nothing else, passion and honesty will take a student a long way."

Like Koontz, Kristina Courtwright has seen both sides of mentoring. She says:

"I have been on both sides of the mentoring relationship. I would say communication is key. Listening to each other and trying to integrate what has been said can be difficult. People can get defensive ... if they feel like they are not being heard, not taken seriously, or that their comments might be misunderstood. It can be difficult to take criticism well.

"Mentoring relationships can be good places to try out some communication skills, in a way that is a bit less threatening. Mentors usually realize that mentees are still learning and will make mistakes. It is important to learn from your mistakes and not take things too personally. The mentor is helping you out, but that is not their only job, so try to be respectful of their time and effort. Mostly, be open to the experience and the things that you are learning, even if it is hard to do."

Another disabled person who has worked with the DO-IT Program, Eric Patterson , says this:

"It is important to give your mentor good feedback and let them know what you need. However, if you decide you need to comment or request further assistance, you should watch your tone of voice so you don't sound demanding.

"I have been doing volunteer projects at Independent Living Resources where I am training a student how to use a talking computer. I suppose you could consider me (the mentor) to the student. Sometimes she doesn't give good feedback. She's not demanding, and she is making a good effort to follow my instructions. However, when I ask her how she is doing at learning a specific operation, she frequently doesn't respond very quickly. This only makes my duty as a mentor more difficult in that I don't get a good idea of how to improve my teaching strategy.

"On the other hand, I have tried to mentor people who were really demanding. For example, I have tried to give technical advice to students while I was living at the School for the Blind. Some of the students would get really demanding when they didn't think I was giving them the assistance they need. This only makes me feel self-conscious because it makes me feel as though I am in trouble, and then I start wishing I had not taken the time to work with them.

"The main point is that you need to be up-front with your mentor, but not demanding."

Go to Top of Page


What to Talk to Your Mentor About

The Mentoring Group's Dr. Linda Phillips-Jones describes a whole new type of conversation happening on college campuses and in workplaces. Instead of casual conversation, she observes, "The dialogs have purpose." That purpose is to gain the best from mentoring. It is surprising how many programs teach people about the job of mentoring but provide little guidance for mentees.

Phillips-Jones states that some of the many important conversations you can have with your mentor may encompass the following:

Making decisions: Whether it's which major to choose, whether to apply for a particular job or even whether to confront a difficult co-worker, your mentor can help you at least talk through the options or perhaps even give you the benefit of his own experience in terms of what worked and what didn't.

Checking your progress: A mentor can be a valuable motivator who helps you keep on track. It can be easy to be distracted from a goal. A mentor is someone who can remind you what you're doing and why.

Getting a "reality check": We all can use a "second opinion," especially when the first one was our own! Wrapped up in the minutiae of a situation, you can easily have trouble separating the relevant from the red herring, the important from the sidetracks. A mentor can help you explore a difficult situation so that you can recognize what is important and needs action.

Gaining insight: A mentor can be a guide whose experiences and observations heighten your understanding of your career journey -- just as a tour guide offers a richer experience of a journey than if you travel alone. He can also help you understand yourself and why you might want to make or alter a particular choice.

Learning from experience: Chances are your mentor has been there before or at least has had the opportunity to see how a situation or choice pans out. You can avoid wasting time by discovering, for example, what courses really led to gaining expertise in a career, what job hunting techniques worked (and which didn't), and how to climb the corporate ladder without slipping off.

Getting advice about workplace relationships: When you transition from child to adult, your relationships change. To see just how difficult it is for most people to realize this and act accordingly, just watch one episode of "Judge Judy." Without fail, the conflict between plaintiff and defendant boils down to one or both adults still managing relationships as they did when they were children. They throw tantrums and appeal to "Mother" instead of presenting facts and asking for a fair decision. Adult relationships have firmer boundaries, more distinct protocols, and certainly much stronger consequences. A mentor can help you learn the proper adult response to both positive and difficult workplace relationships.

Running a plan by a trusted friend: When you are deciding how you want to approach a plan, the last thing you need is someone who will slavishly support or ruthlessly criticize you. And you don't want to try to navigate between these two extremes by sailing in the dark. You need someone who can objectively listen to your ideas, support some, suggest alternatives on others, and encourage you to think plans through to logical ends. That person is a mentor.

Nor do you need to confine yourself to career-related issues. Often the physical, social, intellectual and spiritual aspects of your life cannot really be extracted from career issues. So long as you and your mentor agree, these other areas of your life can become part of your "mentoring agenda" so you can also learn from them.

It's important to realize that your relationship with your mentor will grow and become more useful to you over time. A good mentee knows that this program is a process and that learning and growth do not happen overnight. A good mentee is willing to practice, and to ask questions that may not be answered instantly.

Go to Top of Page

Bookmark this article to: