How Can I Find the Right Mentor to Accelerate My Career Growth?

What Are the 4 Stages of a Successful Mentoring Relationship?

Maximize your career potential with The Mentee’s Guide by Lois J. Zachary. Learn how to choose the perfect mentor, set clear goals, and master the 4-phase mentoring cycle to transform professional advice into real-world success. Ready to turn advice into action? Read the full summary now to discover the 7-step “criteria model” for selecting a mentor who will fast-track your professional journey.

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Mentoring and leadership expert Lois J. Zachary presents a sensible approach to turning your mentoring relationship into career-enhancement gold. Zachary, writing with Lory A. Fischler, provides broad coverage, including preparing to be mentored, recruiting the right mentor, establishing the processes and goals of the mentoring relationship, setting a steady schedule, and wrapping up productively. Zachary describes how a mentee eventually can become a mentor and pass along the benefits of having career support from a senior executive.

Take-Aways

• The mentor-mentee relationship traces back to ancient Greece.
• Mentees must prepare for mentoring sessions.
• Selecting the right mentor is an important choice.
• The mentor and the mentee must agree on the logistics and goals of the mentoring process.
• Devote sufficient time to mentoring sessions.
• Quality mentoring includes achieving the right closure.
• Mentees often become mentors.

Summary

The mentor-mentee relationship traces back to ancient Greece.

The concept of a mentor comes from Homer’s Odyssey. In this ancient Greek classic, Odysseus charges an older man named Mentor with safeguarding his son Telemachus while Odysseus is away fighting in the Trojan War.

Later, the Greek goddess Athena appears to Telemachus in the form of Mentor, that same old man, to help him locate his father. Thus, the Athena-turned-Mentor figure performed not only as a teacher and protector but also as a guide.

The modern idea of a mentor stems from this history: Mentors help their mentees clarify and pursue their goals. Mentors also introduce their mentees to relevant research, advanced information, useful contacts, and the knowledge and wisdom they need to fulfill their career objectives.

“Mentors…and you, as a mentee, have access to insights and research about what helps create strong mentoring relationships and what helps adults learn and grow.”

Mentees metaphorically “sit at the foot of the master” to learn, but modern mentees are not passive. They engage actively in the mentoring process and reflect on what they’re learning along the way. Mentoring has seven aspects:

1. Reciprocity – Mentees embrace the mentoring process, as do their mentors.
2. Learning – Mentees gain a deeper understanding from mentors who share their knowledge and expertise.
3. Relationship – The mentor and mentee work together in an atmosphere of mutual trust.
4. Partnership – In the old days of mentoring, the mentor-mentee relationship might be summed up as “I talk, you listen.” Now that mentees engage more fully in the process, the mentor-mentee relationship has become a partnership.
5. Collaboration – Modern mentoring calls for a cooperative give and take.
6. Mutually defined goals – The mentor and the mentee establish the mentee’s learning goals and agree on the objectives of their relationship.
7. Development – Unlike coaching, which can be a process of seeking quick improvement, mentoring leads to long-term enhancement of the mentee’s “skills, knowledge, abilities, and thinking.”

Mentors can be of immense value. They can transform their mentees’ worldview, demystify confusing aspects of their profession, and enable them to build competence and confidence.

A mentoring relationship typically goes through this four-part process.

1. Preparing – In this “getting-ready phase,” the mentor and mentee get ready for the mentoring process, decide how they will handle their collaboration, and discuss their future activities.
2. Negotiating – During this phase, the mentor and mentee establish their plans and nail down the details, including objectives, procedures, guidelines, and boundaries. During this phase, they begin to develop mutual trust.
3. Enabling – This phase is the extensive period of actual mentoring activities.
4. Closure – The mentee and mentor consolidate the learning the mentee has achieved and celebrate the success of their arrangement. This is a time of “integration and moving forward.”

Mentees must prepare for mentoring sessions.

The mentoring process requires both parties to prepare. Before asking a mentor how to prepare for their work together, a mentee must realize that although mentors are often field experts, they don’t necessarily know about the workings of the mentoring process unless they’ve previously mentored others.

“If you can imagine it, you can achieve it. If you can dream it, you can become it.”

The most essential preparation mentees can do is to look honestly within themselves. If you are about to be mentored, begin with intense reflection about where you are in your career and where you want to be. Ask yourself, what is my job? How can I contribute to the organization? What do my colleagues say about my performance? Have I found ways to improve? Think deeply about the answers. Establish what you’d like to gain from being mentored and how it can support your long-term career goals.

Selecting the right mentor is an important choice.

Mentoring can be a valuable learning process for anyone if you partner with the right mentor. Many organizations have formal mentoring programs that make lining up a mentor fairly straightforward.

“We choose our mentors or they choose us. In either case, your decision to participate in mentoring needs to be deliberate and well thought-out so that you can make the most of the opportunity.”

When mentees have a say in the process, most of them report that they selected a mentor based on chemistry: Is this person right or wrong for me? While rapport matters, mentees should employ this “criteria-based decision-making model” to select the right mentor:

1. Determine your objectives – Why do you need a mentor?
2. Define your criteria – What qualities are most important to you in a mentor?
3. Identify a mentor’s “must have” traits – What qualifications do you regard as essential and non-negotiable in your mentor?
4. Prioritize your criteria – Rank the traits you seek in your mentor as carefully and precisely as you would list the attributes you’d want in a new car.
5. Write down your choices – List the names of each potential mentor, relevant details, and his or her pluses and minuses in terms of your objectives.
6. Drop candidates that don’t fulfill your “musts” – Make your must-haves real. If you genuinely need someone with a particular attribute, reject potential mentors who don’t have it.
7. Rank your choices – Use a scale from one to ten to rate potential mentors.
8. Decide – Take your time and choose wisely.

The mentor and the mentee must agree on the logistics and goals of the mentoring process.

For mentoring to work, mentees and mentors must hold “negotiation conversations” early in their relationship. Having an agreement in place concerning mutual expectations and objectives makes it less likely that obstacles will arise in the future.

“Goal setting is probably the most challenging aspect of establishing agreements for both mentors and mentees.”

Such agreements should state broad goals and a shared strategy, outline necessary processes, and establish a “work plan” that enables the mentoring process to thrive and flourish. Consider these necessary features:

1. Clear objectives – What does the mentee want to accomplish during mentoring sessions?
2. Milestones and criteria – How should the mentee and mentor define their success, both in terms of steps along the way and in terms of end results?
3. Deliberate accountability – Without an assurance of mutual accountability, the two parties could waste time going in circles.
4. Guidelines – Every joint endeavor needs rules.
5. Confidentiality – Mentoring requires privacy and confidentiality – build them in from the beginning.
6. Trigger points – Address and establish limits, “boundaries and hot buttons.” If you do not want the mentoring conversation to address some facet of your life, be straightforward about putting it off-limits.
7. Plan for problem-solving – Establish a “protocol” for dealing with any stumbling blocks.
8. Create a “consensual mentoring agreement” – This is a temporary partnering agreement.
9. Action plan – Create a working agenda listing the steps you and your mentor will undertake together.

Devote sufficient time to mentoring sessions.

Making mentoring an active, productive partnership requires both parties to agree to a reliable schedule for their sessions and to spend sufficient time together for their conversations to become sufficiently in-depth to be effective.

“While some relationships just seem to flow, others meander. What makes the difference? The simple answer is doing the work and working the relationship.”

Failure to spend enough time in mentoring sessions is a primary reason mentoring fails. Often, mentors and mentees don’t stick to their intended schedule, or they let interruptions end their sessions early. Meaningful mentoring requires spending enough time working together.

Quality mentoring includes achieving the right closure.

Eventually, your mentoring sessions will come to an end. Reflect on what you learned and, as a mentee, consider how you will continue learning. Closing your mentoring relationships can be a learning experience that launches you into operating independently once again.

“What was the most valuable thing my mentor taught me? Did I achieve my learning goals? What else do I still need to learn?”

Completing one round of mentoring activities doesn’t mean you can’t start new sessions with a different mentor and different goals. Or, you may decide with your original mentor that the two of you will continue to work in new sessions, perhaps with a different objective that reflects what you’ve already accomplished.

Mentees should attain a complete sense of closure with their mentors as “an integral part of the mentoring cycle.” This is a good time to ask your mentor serious questions about meaningful ways to solidify and build on the goals you’ve attained as a result of this process.

Mentees often become mentors.

Mentees and mentors both benefit from the mentoring process. Mentors often learn helpful new information from their mentees, and they derive personal and professional satisfaction from seeing their mentees move ahead. A mentor’s career and reputation can advance due to the mentoring he or she contributes.

“When the right kind of question is asked, deeper learning occurs.”

Mentees who plan to become mentors eventually should develop these distinct skills.

• Reflection – Mentors must be thoughtful people who think before they speak.
• Facilitation – “Shared learning” requires careful facilitation. Mentors must be equipped to ask intelligent questions that productively steer their mentee’s thinking.
• Listening – Most mentees agree that the ability to listen is the skill they value most in their mentors. Accomplished mentors listen for the “noise and for the silence” and use what they hear or don’t hear as “teachable moments.”
• Feedback – Mentees need regular, candid feedback, so they know whether they’re making progress.
• Accountability – The mentoring process rests on meeting “performance expectations.” Mentees should become more skilled thanks to the mentor’s efforts. Mentors must accept that they also own the goals of the mentoring process. That means asking themselves if they helped the mentee reach his or her goals, if they accomplished their objectives as a mentor, and what they might do differently in the future.
• Communication – Mentors must communicate effectively with mentees.

If you are considering becoming a mentor, keep these guidelines in mind:

1. “Look before you leap” – Never agree to participate in a mentoring program without fully understanding the commitment of time and effort you are making.
2. “Make sure you are in the loop” – To give your mentees up-to-date information, stay on top of what your organization is doing, what it is all about, and where it is going.
3. “Be patient” – You and your mentees may go through a few false starts before your give-and-take starts to click. Give each relationship time to work.
4. “Plug in” – Stay current with new technology. If appropriate, use technological tools to help support your mentoring sessions and activities. Usually, mentors are older than their mentees. If your younger mentee is more up-to-date on current technology, you may benefit from some “reverse mentoring” that gives you a tech update.
5. “Don’t make your goals your mentee’s goals” – Instead, make sure your mentee’s goals are challenging. Target them to fit his or her career path.
6. “Keep your biases in check” – Everybody has them, but they serve no purpose, particularly not in mentoring.
7. “Don’t be judgmental” – Keep your mind open when your mentee discusses his or her problems and concerns. Be charitable in your thinking.

About the Authors

Mentoring and leadership expert Lois J. Zachary is president of Leadership Development Services, a Phoenix consultancy where Lory A. Fischler is a senior associate and program-development specialist. They also wrote Starting Strong: A Mentoring Fable.