While many of the basic skills of being a mentor come naturally, you can learn to become an even better mentor, if you have put thought and planning into it. And all of the skills you enhance through practice as a mentor will have application in your role as a manager.
- A planned approach to your development as a mentor involves:
- Maintaining a learning log, in which you capture your reflections on mentoring sessions and any mentoring-relevant learning you receive.
- Feedback from your mentee can be a valuable input, too.
- Identifying specific skills (for example, listening, questioning, being a role model), which you would like to improve.
Identifying opportunities for learning, such as:
- Reading
- Attending workshops or webinars
- Being supervised by a professional coach/ mentor supervisor
- Being part of a mentor co-support community, where you can share
- Issues and explore how to tackle them
- Reflecting on what you could learn from your mentee
- Putting all of this together into a document with the following headings:
- Area of learning potential (learning goal)
- How I will go about making learning happen
- How I will know that I have made progress
- Regularly reviewing your progress towards the learning goals you have set
- Acknowledging unplanned learning as well
- Reflecting on mentoring conversations
For the purposes of your mentor development plan, you can ask yourself at the end a mentoring meeting:
- What do I feel I did well and less well?
- Did I feel out of my depth at any time?
- Were there points, where the conversation lost its purpose and sense of direction?
- What did I learn about myself?
- What did I learn more generally?
- What topics, which we discussed, roused my interest to learn more?
By Professor David Clutterbuck
