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 and sometimes emotions mentees need to reach their important career and life goals.

How to Begin

What do your mentees need to learn, even master, in order to be more successful and more satisfied? Early in your partnership, start to explore what they want to develop. If they aren’t sure, help 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 you have learned as a mentee and mentor, ways to advance in each mentees’ field, unwritten rules for success in their work life organizations, typical risks they face, better ways to close sales, and appropriate protocol at mentor’s staff meetings and business social events

Attitudes and Emotions: more assertive, less anxious about presenting own ideas, more patient with new hires, less pessimistic about meeting sales quota, more energized feelings, – ones that give mentees energy (like feeling bold, happy, calm, accepted, etc.) and less intense or even fewer energy draining feelings – ones that drag mentees down (like anger, embarrassment, envy, fear, hurt, etc.).

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

From Possibilities to Goals

Once your mentees identify a few potential competencies to develop, ask each of them to choose one and write down a specific goal for it. For example, if one of your mentees 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 February 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 each of your mentees to break down the larger difficult target into smaller feasible and desirable chunks and to help each partner practice and master each competency.

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