 Clara
couldn’t get it. Her mentor was trying to teach her a financial
principle related to “downstream” expenses in their
gas and oil refining and distribution company. She felt frustrated
and embarrassed. She knew she was far from being a “quick
study.”
As part of your mentee-specific skill called Learning Quickly,
you want to convince your mentor that you’re a good
investment of time and energy. Let’s assume I’m
your mentor. To do my mentoring job well, I want to be sure you’re
achieving what you’ve set out to learn. The only way to
be sure you are is to gather data about you:
what I see you perform and hear you say, what others tell me about
you (if you give me permission to talk with them), and what you
tell me you’re learning. This means you’ll have to
“prove” to me that our mentoring work together is
paying off so that I’ll stay motivated to help you (and
not the many other prospective mentees who are knocking on my
door).
Let’s assume that you’re trying to improve your skill
of influencing others to accept your ideas. In one of
our mentoring sessions, I teach you a couple of principles I’ve
learned about influencing people, and I also have you listen in
while I make a phone call to a colleague in which I influence
her to do something. When I hang up, you and I discuss what worked
and what didn’t work. Before you leave, you thank me for
the session and maybe even compliment me on my performance on
the phone. I’m pleased, but how can I be sure that you’ve
really made progress on the skill of influencing others?
What could you do to prove it to me? Here are a few ideas:
- Before you leave, try to influence me to
do something for you before our next meeting (perhaps let you
borrow a publication).
- When I agree, tell me how you recognize that
you just positively influenced me and how encouraging that was
to you.
- A day or so later, send me a voice mail, e-mail, or a written
note mentioning another influencing effort
you made and the results.
- Try yet another influencing application before
our next meeting.
- When we get together again in person or on the phone, tell
me about the results, linking it back to what I tried
to teach and model for you. (“Linda, when I influenced
my team member, I used your concept of letting her vent first,
and I also waited out the long pauses more than I usually do.”)
Remember, your mentors can’t read your mind. They need
data to let them know you’ve learned and
learned quickly. If they get this feedback, will they be willing
to invest more time in your development? You can be sure they
will!
Showing Effort Counts a Great Deal
This doesn’t mean that you have to learn everything instantly.
Sometimes you’ll struggle with a new concept or skill and
have to work incredibly hard to master it. In the opening example,
Clara put in several extra hours to learn, found excellent in-house
learning resources, asked another mentee who already understood
the concept to help her, practiced formulas on paper, and e-mailed
her mentor a couple more clarifying questions. She finally “got
it,” her mentor was pleased, and he invited her to learn
an even more difficult concept, a “punishment” they
laughed about later.
For more ideas on being an effective mentee, see our Archive
and Products (especially The
Mentee’s Guide).
|
