Author: Cheryl Campbell

Mentoring is critical to career success and satisfaction and it offers significant benefits to both mentors and mentorees but mentoring is not always effective. When a mentoring relationship fails it leaves people disappointed. They can blame themselves, their mentoring partner, the mentoring program or the organization.It is a promise unfulfilled and can leave a lasting, poor opinion of mentoring and close people to new opportunities in the future.

Recent research in an academic setting identified 5 characteristics of failed mentoring relationships. The good news is they also revealed 5 characteristics of successful mentoring! I’ve listed them in the table below.

No one wants to fail. To set yourself up for success from the start, I recommend these 5 steps.

#1 Build Rapport

Make your early meetings as relaxed as possible, perhaps over coffee. Spend some time getting to know each other. Look for what you have in common in your personal as well as professional background including interests, hobbies or sport. Finding common ground makes it easier to build rapport, you feel like you’re on the same wavelength. It is the basis of a harmonious relationship. Building Rapport develops mutual respect, personal connection and identifies your shared values.

#2 Discuss Expectations

Share and clarify what you each want from the mentoring relationship. This is a very important step. An initial conversation can include:

Your purpose and goals – why are you each engaging in mentoring?
Scope and boundary of the relationship – what will and won’t be on the agenda?
Roles and Responsibilities – who does what?
Logistics – practical aspects, how often, where and when you want to connect?

Discussing Expectations helps deal with failure factors such as poor communication and lack of commitment and clarifies expectations .

#3 Create an Agreement

The beginning is the best time to negotiate the ways you will respect each other’s time, needs and differences. It’s good to agree on:

Ground rules or guidelines.
Etiquette – do’s and don’ts
Ethics – code of conduct

An agreement deals with most, if not all of the features of failure, demonstrates respect and makes explicit expectations

#4 Understand mentoring is 2-way

Mentoring is a partnership that benefits both mentors and mentorees. Each will develop and grow. It also helps to recognize that mentors are not expected to have all the answers. They will listen and ask as much (or more) than they show and tell.

Seeing mentoring as 2-way builds the reciprocity. It can also overcome a mentor’s lack of experience.

#5 Schedule a Review

After a few meetings have a conversation about:

What you’ve achieved
What’s working well
What you’d prefer to do differently

A review allows you to: Confirm your commitment to continue mentoring; seek additional support, guidance or resources; or, agree to exit the relationship without fault or failure.

Taking these 5 simple steps at the start is the best way to ensure your mentoring works.

By Ann Rolfe, Mentoring Works

3 Ways Mentoring Leverages Learning
By Ann Rolfe, Mentoring Works

They say only 10% of workplace learning comes from formal education and training; 20% comes from observing, emulating and talking with other people; but a whopping 70% comes from experience.

But experience is the worst teacher! She gives you the test, then the lesson. That’s why we say: “I wish I knew then what I know now!” It’s hindsight, 20-20 vision in the rearview mirror!

Learning from experience only happens when you stop. Reflect. Get the lesson from the experience. That’s called insight. Without it, the person who says they have 10 years experience may really only have 1 year’s experience, repeated 10 times.

What mentoring does is use hindsight to create insight and turn it into foresight.

And that 20% observing, emulating and talking with other people? What if they are the wrong people?

When my youngest child was a teenager, I met a couple who told me they built a fire pit in their back yard. On Saturday nights their teenage kids and their friends would come around, everybody was welcome. They’d put on a BBQ for all of them and afterwards sit around the fire pit with the kids, getting to know them, telling stories and just talking, while they toasted marshmallows on the fire. The dad said: “I want to know where my kids are and who they’re with. If you want them to fly with the eagles you don’t let them hang out with the turkeys”.

You must choose who you’ll hang out with and pick your mentors.

Finally, the 10% formal education and training? This is the biggest investment for organisations and individuals, in terms of money and time and lost productivity. Sending people off-the-job in the hope that they will return and apply learning on-the-job is delusional.

Don’t get me wrong! I believe in life-long learning and I know the value of training and conferences. But I also know this: 80% of learning is lost – never gets applied – unless there is on-the-job coaching or mentoring .

The learning environment has evolved and mentoring is the key. Mentoring leverages the 70, the 20 and the 10. It adds value, extends and enhances all types of learning and when managers also mentor their people, learning can be applied on the job to make a real difference. That’s how mentoring works.

Next Live Webinar Tuesday 30 June 7.30pm

Mentoring – The Art of Feedback

Register Now!

Mentorees make a courageous choice every time they divulge aspirations, goals or obstacles and difficulties. They put their confidence and trust in the mentor to treat them with respect and preserve confidentiality and privacy.

For mentors, it can take courage to embark on the role. After all, it usually the brightest and the best that want to be mentored, smart people who want to advance their career and professional development. Those that understand mentoring also recognise that there is a paradox in mentoring: you offer your ideas and experience and seek to inspire your mentoree, yet you encourage them to make their own decisions, knowing that their choices may not be the ones you’d make.

Both mentor and mentoree may find that their assumptions and normal way of interpreting the world are challenged as they gain different ways of looking at things. Both need to have the ability to give and receive feedback and that takes courage too.

To get the best from mentoring you need to step up and accept the challenges offered by this kind of relationship. Mentoring is a unique chance to look at yourself honestly. It is an opportunity to open your mind, question your thinking, consider alternatives and choose actions.

Mentoring can literally change your mind. Because it is an adventure into the unknown for both the mentor and the mentoree, it may be a bit scary. You have to prepare and build confidence before you jump into mentoring.

You need to create a safe space for your mentoring conversations. This means building trust in one another. That’s how mentoring works.

Don’t forget to register for the final Webinar 4: Mentoring – The Art of Feedback
Date: Tuesday 30 June 2015
Time: 7:30pm EST
Registration: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/5559610543939154178

By Ann Rolfe, Mentoring Works

The following excerpt from an article printed in The Age on May 2, 2015.
‘Help the nurses to keep us all alive.
The cost of health is exploding in Australia.
Nurses are a great group of people but I have to say, they’re badly done by. This highly qualified profession of mainly women simply don’t get paid enough for the lifesaving work they do. If we’re not careful, we suddenly won’t have the nurses that we need.
Consider the fact that for the last 20 years, nurses have been rated number 1 as the most trusted profession in Australia, with 91 per cent of Australians ranking them as very high or high for ethics and honesty. The rankings make sense.
Nursing is now a profession requiring a tertiary degree as a minimum standard with options for even higher levels of attainment. Hours are very long and the workload is demanding because of a chronic shortage of nurses. According to a Monash University study, 15 per cent of nurses are considering leaving in the coming year. Their average age is now 44.5 years and the number of them over 50 has increased from 33 per cent to 39 per cent in the four years to 2011. In short, we’re running out of these incredible people and not replacing them.
So how much do they earn? A registered nurse with a degree earns between $52,000 and $79,000 pa — and that’s less than any executive’s PA.
We’ve got a new Health Minister, Sussan Ley. She replaced Peter Dutton who was voted the worst health minister in memory. I think Ley is going to make a difference and one way she could write herself into favourable history is to fix this developing crisis. My suggestion is that she immediately starts moving funds from a centralised and useless bureaucracy and overgrown administration to the nurses on the hospital floor.
After all, if we don’t look after our nurses, who will look after us?’
Harold Mitchell: Help the nurses to keep us all alive
May 2, 2015. The Age http://www.theage.com.au/business/comment-and-analysis/harold-mitchell-help-the-nurses-to-keep-us-all-alive-20150501-1mwtwg.html

Whilst the article refers to nurses working in the hospital setting, it is relevant for all of us, and we have all walked a few miles in these shoes haven’t we?