Tips for Mentors

HELPING MENTEES DO RESEARCH
by Dr. Linda Phillips-Jones

Leadership experts including Peter Senge and Warren Bennis emphasize that you'll benefit greatly from having a personal vision, what you want to make of yourself and your world in the next one to five years. In addition, one of your mentoring tasks is to help your mentees clarify and implement their visions. This month and next you'll learn some techniques for doing both.

Clarify your own vision before helping your mentees with theirs. Click on Creating or Revising Your Personal Vision (Tool #1) for the first of two tools you can use to work on your own vision. Print it out, work on it in private, and share all or part with persons you trust.
Use your completed Tool #1 as a specific example to show your mentees, emphasizing that this is your life, not theirs. Theirs will look very different. If you feel comfortable, show a written copy to your mentees.
Ask your mentees to complete Tool #1 before your next mentoring sessions with them.
At those meetings, ask your mentees to describe their findings, any "Ah-hahs" they've had. Don't discourage them from their tentative ideas.
Use the Vision Probing Question: "If you had ______, what would that bring you?" For example: If you had the cabin in the mountains, what would that bring you? (Family could be together, place to write my book, etc.)
Don't rush your mentees. Take a few sessions to explore and clarify what's important to them before setting firm goals.

Important Note: Some mentees will come to you with specific objectives and want to get right to work on these. In other words, they won't want to explore personal visions and long range plans for their lives. If this is the case, you can certainly begin with the specifics they request. Weeks or months later, when you've built trust and had a chance to know them and their strengths, you can invite them to step back and explore the future and their personal visions. As a mentor, you have that unique opportunity to help mentees with their "big picture."
For more ideas on being an effective mentor, see The Mentor's Guide and "75 Things to Do with Your Mentee," listed in the Product List.