Category: Mentor

Four Reasons Why Introverts Make Good Mentors

In the workplace, employees chosen to mentor less experienced staff are generally selected on the basis of their objective work skills. For example, if the mentee is joining the accounting department, then a more senior employee in that department is often chosen as the mentor. Similarly, if the mentee is an apprentice tradesman, the mentor chosen is a colleague more skilled in that trade and in how it’s carried out in the workplace.

But, the subjective (or “soft”) skills of a mentor matter, too. If you’re an introvert and have been chosen to be a mentor because of your technical skills, know that you have even more to offer!

Here are four (more) reasons why introverts can make good mentors:

  1. Introverts prefer to develop fewer, more meaningful professional relationships rather than to engage in relatively superficial relationships with a large network. The benefit to the mentee:  your mentor is more than willing to invest time and energy in your mentor/mentee relationship.
  2. Introverts are good listeners. The benefit to the mentee:  your mentor will be attentive to what you’re saying, enabling her to engage in a relevant two-way conversation and to focus on achieving a mutually satisfying outcome.
  3. Introverts thnk, and think, and think again before speaking up or offering solutions. The benefit to the mentee: your mentor will respond thoughtfully to the issues important to you both, and provide you with her most useful perspectives, informed by her knowledge of the company’s “big picture” goals.
  4. Introverts love ideas, images, thought experiments, and “what ifs” – all things related to their inner world. The benefit to the mentee: your mentor will welcome ideas that to you may seem “out-of-the-box,” perhaps even “out of left field.” But, as a mentor with company goals in mind, she’ll then want to test them and vet them for “do-ability” within your work environment.

For all you introvert mentors (and would-be-mentors): recognize that your preferred work styles facilitate satisfying and productive mentor/mentee relationships.  Your collegial and productive discussions directly benefit the company and can direct you both toward achieving your business and professional goals.

Looking for a “Sponsor”?

Even with effective mentoring relationships in the workplace, employees can feel “stalled” in their careers. Often, what seems to be missing from their professional life is someone with influence and “clout” within the organization to help them advance to the next level. That someone can be called a “sponsor.” It’s evident from the previous line that a mentor is not necessarily a sponsor. And, more often than not, the sponsor you’re looking for may never have served as your mentor. Before you go looking for a sponsor, consider these three essential requirements for career advancement:

  1. Opportunity:  there needs to be a “job opening” for which you meet management’s qualifications in terms of your objective professional and personal attributes. 
  2. Timing:  you need to be “ready” to step into the new role and achieve success in that role…success as defined by management’s needs for that role.
  3. Sponsorship:  there needs to be someone who steps up and sponsors you to be considered for that advancement…someone who, usually by his/her previous success in the workplace and knowledge of the job, has the confidence of management generally and is perceived by management to have good judgment in personnel matters specifically

Now that you know how sponsors fit into career advancement, here is an action plan for you:

  1. Keep your antennae up for specific job openings that to you would represent career advancement
  2. Think honestly about how your professional and personal attributes would qualify (or disqualify!) you for the specific advancement that’s potentially open to you
  3. If you think you are a strong candidate for a specific advancement, talk to your mentor and/or to your direct supervisor about your interest in contributing to the company in that new role and why and how you could be successful in that role. Ask for their advice regarding how to move forward as a candidate.

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Mentor or Role Model? How About Both!

In the workplace, mentors have a powerful influence on those they mentor. The mentor is a role model whose day-to-day behavior shapes the workplace culture. Being a role model involves more than just job competency. It involves mentoring yourself first, before you mentor or manage others. Here are 7 tips to mentor yourself in order to mentor others and together to influence the larger workplace culture:

  1. CHOOSE your words carefully before you speak
  2. CONSIDER the consequences before you act
  3. BE AWARE of your emotions without allowing them to dictate your decisions
  4. LISTEN, LISTEN, LISTEN
  5. LEARN from others
  6. DEMONSTRATE loyalty
  7. TAKE TIME to check yourself frequently on how you’re doing as a role model and plan corrective action accordingly

If practiced consistently, these 7 tips will help you shape a workplace culture that’s respectful, honest, and mature. How powerful is that!

A Checklist for Mentors

Mentors, here is the good news: it’s likely that all elements you need to carry out an effective mentoring program are already available within your company. Whether you’re just beginning a mentoring program or already have one in place, consider the following diagnostic checklist of effective mentoring practices to learn where you may want to make improvements to your process:

  1. Is mentoring a priority?

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 and your mentoring activities appear at least twice a week on your calendar, you are visibly and actively making mentoring a priority for both you and your mentee.

  1. How visible are your mentee’s assignments to upper management?

Mentored staff should be assigned a “real” project as soon as they join the work unit. The new staff as well as the mentor 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, it’s a highly visible assignment.

  1. How and how often do you review progress on assignments with your mentee?

Mentors should schedule a weekly 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.

  1. What resources are available to your mentee to learn and navigate the workplace culture?

Mentors should introduce the new staff member to established staff members who can serve as resources for questions related to the key support tasks of daily life at the office/lab/shop. If resources are available and in place for the mentee to tap, you’ve effectively and usefully expanded your mentee’s internal network.

  1. How does your mentee learn about external market and industry dynamics that affect your business?

Mentors should schedule 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 to allow free-ranging conversations. These more free-ranging conversations provide the opportunity for mentors to introduce forward-looking topics such as changing market or industry dynamics and the company’s planned responses to them.

  1. What are the opportunities to transition a mentor to assignments with greater responsibility/autonomy?

Mentors 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.

  1. What access does your mentee have to needed domain or subject matter experts within the company?

Both mentor and mentee should recognize and utilize the good will that usually exists among more experienced staff toward new, less experienced staff members. As the need arises, the 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 the guidance they provided is gratifying.

  1. Do your mentoring processes reflect needs unique to mentees “fresh out of school”?

Employees fresh out of school, with little or no prior experience in a corporate work environment, benefit from mentoring that addresses issues specific to that situation. Aside from all the issues addressed in the previous diagnostic/checklist points, there is the additional issue of these new-to-business employees being unfamiliar with aspects of business that all of your experienced employees take for granted, e.g., company/business vocabulary; firm business and financial objectives; company communications, both top down and horizontal; and ways in which different departments interact with each other. Review the content and format of your orientation sessions, perhaps with the input from a fresh-from-school employee who joined a year or two ago, to identify gaps in your existing onboarding practices and how to fill them.

  1. Do you have a mentoring process that specifically addresses senior level mentees?

A key marker of senior-level employees is strategic thinking. Thinking and acting strategically is a transferable skill – one that enhances a mentee’s prospects for advancement to other roles within the company. Through all of the mentor-led discussions described previously, the mentee herself begins to think and act strategically, strengthening the alignment between her personal professional goals and those of the company. If the mentee is fully engaged in producing outcomes that the company values, she will be noticed – and noticed favorably – by her colleagues. As a mentor, once you see that happening, you know you’ve contributed effectively to your mentee’s career development

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