As a mentor, one of your primary tasks is helping your mentees develop new or improved capabilities, or as we call them, “competencies.” These are the skills, knowledge, and attitudes mentees need to reach their important career and life goals.

How to Begin

What does your mentee need to learn, even master, in order to be more successful and more satisfied? Early in your relationship, start to explore what your mentee wants to develop. If he/she isn’t sure, help with the exploration process by brainstorming numerous competencies.

Here’s what one pair identified as possibilities for the mentee:

Skills: delegating more tasks to direct reports, writing reports, making more dynamic oral presentations, thinking strategically, balancing work and personal demands, leading cross-functional teams

Knowledge: lessons mentor has learned, ways to advance in this field, unwritten rules for success in this organization, typical risks mentee faces, better ways to close sales, and appropriate protocol at mentor’s staff meetings and business social events

Attitudes: more assertive, less anxious about presenting own ideas, more patient with new hires, less pessimistic about meeting sales quota

The list of possible competencies is probably endless, so don’t spend more than a couple of meetings deciding on one or more for your mentee to tackle first.

From Possibilities to Goals

Once your mentee identifies a few potential competencies to develop, ask her/him to choose one and write down a specific goal for it. For example, your mentee wants to improve the skill of “thinking on my feet.” What three goals could she/he set?

1. To become an expert on my subject before presenting to a challenging audience (To be even more concrete, the goal could be: to know my subject of “latest video streaming technology” before presenting to the executive team on July 19th)
   
   
2. To identify at least 50 questions and comments I’m likely to receive
   
   
3. To develop and practice (with my mentor) several credible replies

These are only samples. For this skill, you and your mentee might develop an entirely different set of goals. The point is to teach your mentee to break down the larger difficult target into smaller feasible and desirable chunks and to help her/him practice and master each.

Next month we’ll look at more ideas and strategies for helping your mentees develop their capabilities. Meanwhile, check our Products and Archive for additional mentoring suggestions.