Author: workmatters21stcentury

Meeting Your Mentor at Starbucks? Think Again!

Visit one of the more popular and well-known coffee shop chains during any workday and you’re likely to see business going on. Solo entrepreneurs and freelancers are deeply immersed in their mobile devices or PCs, looking settled in for the day at their “office.” One-on-one conversations are happening at other tables: networking, informational interviews, job interviews, meeting a colleague from another company to hatch a great new idea. Other coffee shop meetings look much more serendipitous: someone spots a friend or business associate and starts a conversation that lasts as long as the latte does. Then, off to the “real office” refreshed and invigorated.

These “off campus” locations are so popular with working millennials and other business people that Microsoft Office 365 has an app that enables people to schedule meetings at Starbucks via Outlook! Such venues do provide an informal, casual atmosphere that can help develop and strengthen the personal relationships that reinforce business relationships.

But it’s just that informal, casual atmosphere can limit the usefulness of these venues for internal mentor and mentee conversations (internal meaning that both mentor and mentee belong to the same organization).

Mentoring is first and foremost a business activity, and the relationship between a mentee and mentor is a professional one. The mentor is a unique resource for the mentee’s successful “onboarding” and subsequent professional development and advancement within the company. With respect to development of the mentee’s career, the mentor maintains an ongoing and performance-oriented awareness of the mentee’s skills, style, contributions, strengths, and preferences over time and uses this awareness for advice, coaching, and/or redirection. With respect to the mentee’s career advancement, the mentor can be the first to spot potential opportunities, as well as provide sponsorship of the mentee for those opportunities.

Most if not all of these internal mentee/mentor activities and interactions may be best carried out within the workplace (e.g., in an office, conference room, company cafeteria)– ideally as part of established company business practices. For the mentee, internal mentee/mentor communication can help produce the most desirable outcomes of mentoring.

Moreover, workplace-based conversations can enhance that communication in the following ways:

  1. Improved timeliness: Said another way: “catch someone doing something right – and tell them right now!” If you’ve made a valuable contribution to a sales meeting, marketing presentation, research project, wouldn’t you like to know it? It’s satisfying and motivating to hear your mentor say, “you did a good job,” followed by some specific comments on what was good. Simple, straightforward communication like that can happen in the hallway or inside/outside the conference room – no need to wait to schedule time at a coffee shop!
  2. Greater frequency: Closely associated with improved timeliness is frequency of feedback. How often would you want to schedule a meeting at an offsite location? Once per week? Once per month? In contrast, onsite feedback could easily happen multiple times per week, without the logistic complications of getting to and from an offsite location.
  3. Better quality: Outside, informal venues, where you’re watching the clock to be sure you get back to the office for the next work obligation, aren’t conducive to back-and-forth discussion. A monologue from a time-pressed mentor may not lead to a shared understanding of the issues you wanted to discuss in more depth. A quality conversation needs focused time and attention from both parties. If you need or want that, seek to schedule a meeting in the office.
  4. Favorable management and peer perceptions: The unwritten (and sometimes unexpressed) rule is that the purpose of offsite meetings, no matter how ostensible the business intent, is to promote and develop personal relationships. If a mentor and mentee are viewed as being more friends than professional colleagues, management and peers may view the mentor as being unable to remain objective while delivering feedback. In contrast, mentee/mentor professional relationships developed and exercised within the formalities of the workplace are less likely to trigger such perceptions and, instead, result in favorable management and peer perceptions.

When might you consider an offsite venue for an internal mentee/mentor conversation? When you’ve accomplished a significant goal, objective, milestone, or achievement. Head to the nearest, nicest, most congenial coffee shop for “lattes all around!”

This blog was originally published in the Association for Talent Development:            Think Twice About Meeting Your Mentor at Starbucks!

Mildred Hastbacka, Ph.D., is principal contributor to this Work Matters blog and is also Founder and Managing Member of Prakteka LLC, a business-focused technology consulting company. She has more than 30 years of industrial experience in business management, marketing, commercial development, manufacturing technical support, and product and process research and development at Corporate and Divisional levels. Learn more at http://www.prakteka.com or email Mildred at mah@prakteka.com.

Performance Review Time? Your Mentor Can Help!

Fast forward to your next annual performance evaluation. In front of you is the self-evaluation section of the evaluation form, waiting to be filled in: Accomplishments…Training…Areas for improvement…Development plans. You have some accomplishments, but are they ones that matter to your employer? You’ve completed some training sessions, but these seemed more like “check-the-box” activities. Do these sessions relate to your performance, now or in the future? Regarding areas for improvement, you’ve done what was expected and everyone seems satisfied, so how do you know what improvements you should focus on? As for development plans, it doesn’t seem as if there are any obvious opportunities for new or different challenges, let alone promotions.  The details of your performance evaluation may be different from the ones just listed, but it’s likely that your evaluation criteria will include 1) what you’ve done and how well you’ve done it; 2) additional skills you’ve acquired through formal or informal training; 3) ways in which you can add more value to your employer; and 4) how all this could add up to professional advancement, including pay increases!

It’s no secret that career development programs at many employers have become diluted or disappeared entirely in recent years.  So, are you entirely on your own to build the best possible case to your employer that investing in you is a good move?  No, you aren’t entirely on your own – your mentor can be your career development ally in ways you might not expect.  Let’s take the performance appraisal  criteria one by one and see how a mentor might help not only your evaluation but your career as well:

  1. Your accomplishments

Accomplishments that employers value include those that directly support the company’s financial performance. If you’re in a sales position, for example, your accomplishments include meeting your dollar sales targets. What if it looks as if you’re going to miss your sales targets, even though you’ve diligently worked hard to achieve them?  Your mentor can help you develop an action plan to get back on target.  The action plan could include identifying and making calls on specific new customers, reconnecting with old customers, or surveying existing customers for their needs for complementary products and services. Once executed, the action plan is an accomplishment in itself.

  1. Training

Ever thought of training as creative?  It can be! Your mentor can help you brainstorm innovative ways in which you can strengthen skills related to your current job, as well as help build toward new assignments.  If you’re in inside sales or customer service, for example, your mentor might facilitate your attending one of the regularly scheduled sales and marketing meetings. This informal training yields dividends to you and your employer in the form of strengthened relationships between outside sales and the inside support group and greater understanding of the customer needs the company is trying to address.

  1. Improvement

When areas of improvement center on the “softer” side of employee performance, such as being a team player or when and how to speak up at group meetings, your mentor might be your only source of insight into the unwritten rules that govern so much of this behavior within the workplace.  Have you just joined a top-down organization like the Patriots where “keep quiet” and “do your job” is the mantra for each team member? Your mentor can tell you if you have, as well as describe how your company’s mantra translates to your day-to-day behavior, from showing up on time to perfecting the skills for which you were hired. If you doubt that this softer side of employee performance adds value to the organization, remind yourself that the Patriots were the first team to reach nine Superbowl playoffs (in the 2016-2017 season) and won five of them.

  1. Development

Your mentor knows the difference between employee “potential” and “preparedness”. In most organizations, there are three simultaneous prerequisites for a promotion: timing, opportunity, and sponsorship.  Your mentor can be involved in all three, but can be “make or break” in regard to the timing issue. Having worked regularly with you over time, your mentor may be the only one who can make a persuasive case that you indeed are professionally prepared to assume the new role when it becomes available. Timing also involves your mentor seeing beyond the immediate horizon, at specific opportunities for you that may be a year or more in the future and for which you and your mentor can formulate a development plan.

With all this unexpected, newfound help from your mentor, your career ally, you may actually be hoping to fast forward to your next performance appraisal. When you’re there, savor the experience and satisfaction of capturing all your accomplishments. And remember your mentor when you get to the top!

Originally published in Association for Talent Development, https://www.td.org/insights/4-unexpected-ways-a-mentor-can-be-your-career-development-ally

 

 

 

 

 

Lessons Learned from the Front Lines of Mentoring

Start a social media conversation thread about mentoring and the replies from those in the working world will get your attention. At the summary level, the responses are remarkably similar across geographies, types of business, professions, genders, age, and years of experience. Professionals know what “mentoring” is but, more often than not, their experiences of it in practice are unsatisfying: mentoring seemed impersonal, unofficial, casual, perfunctory, ineffective, or simply absent. Frequently, the mentee was left to identify their own mentor, even in companies with other well-codified business processes!

What’s also often missing from mentoring is the “how”—as in, the “how to do it right.” I have been mentored and been a mentor during the entire span of my working life in both large and small companies. Based on that cumulative and varied experience, I can say that mentoring done right is a management activity that yields noticeably higher levels of management and employee satisfaction, engagement, contribution and productivity. Here are seven lessons I’ve learned from the front lines of mentoring regarding how to do it right:

  1. Mentoring is a management activity, not just a management “responsibility.” A mentor proactively and directly interacts with staff being mentored. If you are a mentor/manager and your mentoring activities appear at least twice a week on your calendar, you’re doing it right.
  2. Mentored staff should be assigned a “real” project as soon as they join the work unit. The new staff as well as the mentor/manager need to quickly develop a sense of where and how the mentee can contribute to projects that matter. If the mentee’s project is important enough to show up on the monthly or quarterly general management review agenda, you’re doing it right.
  3. Mentor/managers should schedule a weekly project review meeting for each project in which the mentored staff participate. Ask that the new staff prepare written weekly summaries in advance of the review meeting. The entire project team, as well as the new staff, benefit from this discipline of preparing written summaries in advance. If your mentee pro-actively contributes to the review meeting discussion and development of “next step” action plans, you’re doing it right.
  4. Mentor/managers should introduce the new staff member with established staff members who can serve as resources for questions related to the key support tasks of daily life at the office/lab/shop. Some examples of these key support tasks include time card practices, ISO quality procedures, purchasing procedures, and, equally importantly, the “unwritten” rules of life in the work unit and in the company. Check back with the mentee to learn if there are any other procedures that need to be covered. If resources are available and in place for the mentee to tap, you’re doing it right.
  5. Mentor/managers should set up regular one-to-one “touch base” meetings not associated with performance evaluation activities. These “touch base” meetings should be office-based but without a formal agenda: their purpose is to allow time for the mentor/manager to discuss company-related topics not necessarily connected with ongoing projects—and for the mentee to do the same. Formal performance evaluation discussions are usually limited in scope and necessarily backward looking, i.e., focused on specific work already performed. The more free-ranging conversations in a touch base meeting provide the opportunity for mentor managers to introduce forward looking topics such as changing market or industry dynamics and the company’s planned responses to them. If you’re having touch base meetings at least once per week in first 3-4 months of the mentee’s employment, you’re doing it right.
  6. Mentor/managers should treat mentored staff as adults, even if they are “junior” staff based on age or experience. Mentored staff are with your company to contribute and they want to contribute to the real project to which they’ve been assigned. If the mentee is surprised that they are successfully doing more advanced work or exercising more responsibility than they expected, then you’re doing it right.
  7. Both mentor/manager and mentee should recognize and utilize the good will that usually exists among the more experienced staff toward new, less experienced staff members. As the need arises, the manager/mentor should identify other more senior staff who can serve as a resource for project-specific issues that arise during the course of the work. For mentees, senior staff input can help get projects “unstuck”. For senior staff, having a mentee succeed after following their guidance is gratifying. Watch for indications that mentees are engaging with senior staff, even if informally at coffee or in the office. If you see that engagement, especially on a regular basis, you’re doing it right.

One final lesson learned

From my conversations with mentors over the years and right up to the present, there is one more lesson learned: mentors report that mentoring is one of the most rewarding experiences of their professional and personal lives. There is a “feel-good” feeling that results from successful mentoring—one that isn’t duplicated by any other management activity. Perhaps you, as a mentor manager reading this post, have experienced this feeling already. If so, then you’ve done it right!

Also published in Thoughtleaders LLC: http://www.thoughtleadersllc.com/2017/11/7-lessons-learned-from-the-front-lines-for-mentoring-done-right/

Mildred Hastbacka, Ph.D., is Founder and Managing Member of Prakteka LLC, a business-focused technology consulting company.  She has more than 30 years of industrial experience in business management, marketing, commercial development, manufacturing technical support, and product and process research and development at Corporate and Divisional levels. In addition to her expertise in project planning and management, she is also a recognized expert in technology assessment, technology commercialization and technology valuation.

mah@prakteka.com

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