Are you a Mentor?
To teach, you must be willing to
learn. I have learnt more as a mentee than as a mentor. Mentoring is
not about ‘I give, you take’. Mentoring is about effective communication.
Mentoring is about speaking your heart out and it is a skill to develop. A
mentor may not even know that he is being considered as a mentor. A
mentoring relationship can last forever. If people take your experience as
a learning opportunity for them, you’ve already mentored without a formal
process. All of us are mentors and all of us are mentees.
Mentoring is more of a practice than a theory or a concept. It cannot be
‘perfectly’ defined. Mentoring can be used by organizations to increase
their ability to deal with people. If it is positioned as an HR
initiative, it wouldn’t work as effectively as it would as a people’s
initiative. In the corporate sector, mentoring is understood as a tool to
develop leadership within the organization. It is a process of the senior
and more experienced members of an organization guiding and helping the
junior and less experienced members in their career and personal
development. Mentoring is a process of building mutually beneficial
partnership to help develop skills, behaviour and insights to reach the
partner’s goals which a mentor has no stake in the outcome of. Mentoring
is a relationship where two people involved are always together at power
in the learning process.
A mentor has several roles to play. He is a Coach, a Counsellor, a
Netoworker and a Facilitator. As a mentor, you have to learn to respond
without giving solutions. As a mentor you don’t even have to tell people
what they have to do as they will never do it. Direction can easily slip
into becoming a solution, so as a mentor you don’t even have to ‘direct’.
Mentees come for answers but the mentor comes with questions. Mentors find
it difficult to hold back solutions and mentees find it difficult to hold
back expecting answers to their problems/questions. Mentoring is about
listening with intent. Even silence can be used effectively. A basic human
skill is to convey what you feel, understand and think. A mentor can never
judge his mentee and a mentee is never wrong especially while sharing
emotions. A mentor must encourage mentees to hone their skills at what
they are already good at. There is research evidence to say that when you
appreciate, productivity goes up.
Do not encourage the mentee to use your name for personal gains. Don’t try
to put a ROI on mentoring. Mentoring provides you with the opportunity to
develop your leadership skills. It builds your reputation as a good leader
and helps you network better. If you learn one skill i.e. to reach out,
more than half of your problem would get solved, the skill to reach out.
If you have the basic human skills, you can handle almost all your
problems. “To get people to become humble” is what mentoring is all about.
Written By - Prof. Gowri Joshi
gowrivjoshi@gmail.com |
Writer
Profile
Prof. Gowri Joshi
is
a faculty for Human Resources at a premier
B-school in Mumbai. She is a graduate specializing in Human Development
and her PG specialization is Human Resource Management.
Her interest areas include Behavioural training and personal counselling.
She has
successfully conducted soft skills training sessions for the insurance
sector ; have offered personal counseling services to students and
teenagers (after having topped a certificate course in personal
counselling ); conducted self development workshops for different target
groups like Mumbai police; NAB students; college students; orphan / street
children from NGOs etc. Currently she teaches
subjects like Principles and Practices of Management, Human Resource
Management, Organizational Development among others at a management
institute in Mumbai.
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