Step 3

Set the Direction

“Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.”

—John F. Kennedy

Not too long ago, I worked for a large company whose offices were in several buildings, connected via pass-throughs, but only on certain floors. During my initial visit to this company, after my first appointment, I called my next client to ask for directions to his office. Before he gave me an answer, what did he want to know? He wanted to know from where I was starting. If he just told me he was on the fifth floor, I might have wandered for quite a while, minimizing our time together, not realizing it was the fifth floor in the adjacent building, needing to cross over on floor four. Complicated. Without specific navigation, the early stage of mentoring work could similarly end up going off in the wrong direction.

Helping mentees identify both where they are starting from and where they’d like to go positions us well for the journey. With the destination in mind, the journey can have a familiar cadence, a series of meetings and conversations with both expected and spontaneous topics focused on moving toward that destination. To get you safely to that destination in a reasonable amount of time starts with the setting of your mentee’s development goals.

Formulate Development Goals for the Mentoring Process

At the completion of your mentoring, wouldn’t it be wonderful if you each felt you gained something discernable and significant—new skills, behaviors, insights, knowledge? Though new mentors often think the relationship is its heart, the work of mentoring also needs to be purposeful and directional. In fact, even if the relationship is a bit rocky and not ideal, you can still have great success (so, do not judge the success on relationship alone). Well-crafted development goals, set as the destination, always keep you and your mentee on course.

The nature of the mentee’s development goal is different from a work goal and requires a fresh approach. Work goals relate to performance outputs, especially in relation to the larger department or organization. Many companies do encourage employees to have development goals, but they are usually an add-on and have less priority than performance objectives. With mentoring, development is central; it is the big priority. The mentee development goal needs to be translatable to new behaviors, new modes of thinking, and new skills. As a bonus, it inevitably leads to greater performance. With mentee development goals, the emphasis is also on insights arising from an “internal” focus (that is, related to personal awareness) that is essential for growth, but often not addressed at work. Mentee development goals are thoughtfully developed together through dynamic conversations. Plan on this process taking parts of one or two meetings to do this, usually during your second and third conversations. Your mentee can finalize the goal document as a follow-up to your conversations.

In some cases, your mentee enters the relationship with a singular goal in mind (for example, “I want to be more strategic,” “I’d like to lead a project team”). In other cases, there are a multitude of goals, or none at all. No matter what they enter with, your role is to help them identify a focus that is clear and realistic, making stretch steps within a longer-term direction and with a good chance for attaining success. An effective mentee development goal is one you can make happen together, given your own background and skills and the mentee’s current capabilities and circumstances.

You will learn a good deal about each other as you develop the goals. Creating the goals collaboratively will deepen your relationship and produce more growth. Do not shortchange it. Let’s take a look at Figure 3-1, which shows the three steps: start, shape, and sharpen, along with a mentoring example between Tomás and Bernice.

FIGURE 3-1

FORMULATE MENTEE DEVELOPMENT GOALS

Start: Draft It for a First Round

Whether your mentee has come in with a starting place for their development objective or not, expect to first create a draft goal, one that will get further refined.

Begin with a discussion of the mentee’s aspirations, the bigger picture of where they hope to land in the future. You can establish the setting for open discussion, unfiltered by what the boss or company might think. Create an outward look for growth, whether a role in management, a position in a related field, or deeper expertise in the profession. For a good opener, start with, “What do you wish for yourself professionally, in three years from now, and as an interim, in a year from now?”

Identify what is required—knowledge, skills, behaviors—to take on that role, with information that’s accessible to either yourself or your mentee. Get a handle on this early on, to ensure you are tracking a direction that truly fits the mentee’s interests. I’ve encountered a number of mentees who were disappointed after working toward a role, then finding out that it was not a good fit for them.

Do a gap analysis between your mentee’s current skill set and experience, compared with the intended capabilities. Then determine what will require the most attention. For example, consider: To reach the desired level of competence, which of your mentee’s skills will need deepening? What brand-new capabilities are required? What habits, attitudes, or mindsets will need to be overcome, requiring increased self-insight and understanding of the impact of their behaviors on others? What current, well-developed skills will prove invaluable as your mentee moves to an expanded role?

Let’s consider an example in action. Bernice told her mentor Tomás that she wanted to get out of being the HR “policy enforcer” and move into a position of influence as a senior HR business partner. She identified a draft mentee development goal to become a trusted advisor to several clients, which would involve needing to help clients see the proof/benefits of taking a more long-range approach to managing performance. She would also need to learn how to formulate and raise just the right questions to help her clients think more broadly about team members’ performance. Bernice felt a jolt in the pit of her stomach as she learned about these role requirements; her natural stance was to hold back from asserting her opinions to senior leaders.

Bernice’s gap would require her to step up from her normal stance of using HR policy as her authority to one of using personal influence, wisdom, and engagement. She would need the skills to be a collaborator who truly understood the manager’s challenges and could balance company policy with forward-looking practices. Tomás suggested her goal might still need some shaping.

Shape: Adapt to Learning Opportunities

If you have ever had your clothing tailored, you know the value of a fit that’s created specifically for your needs. Wearing tailored clothing just feels right, you are more confident, and maybe you even strut a little in the new clothes. Taking a broad, ambitious goal, then adjusting and shaping it to be the suitable size and reach, gives the goal the right bearing and sense of personal ownership.

Together, take a look at your mentee’s current work circumstances. In what ways do they provide a window of opportunity to develop skills through experience? Even if your mentee is not in a “feeder” role to the one they hope to achieve, do they have a possibility to grow the required skills? For example, a website customer response analyst may not get to set strategy (that is, the ultimate target), but can gain analytical skills that build into making recommendations for clients, and then potentially create and provide a client presentation about influencing customer behavior.

Embrace the idea that as the mentor, you have no control over whether the mentee can attain useful growth options at work. Say your mentee wants to be a project leader, but is not seen that way by management. As a result, the mentee may not be offered the stepping-stone to that expertise during your mentoring process. If there is no possibility to grow from experience, based on current role or pending assignments, consider another angle for the development goal … one that will allow growth from experience that is within reach. For example, your mentee’s manager may not provide an opportunity to be a deputy to the project leader, but is willing to have your mentee manage collaboration software and time-management tools. Your mentee won’t get people-management skills, but will still get closer to achieving a goal. The point to remember is to shape a goal that includes live, hands-on experience. This is imperative, because growing skills is not a conceptual process. Without the ability to practice through experience, the mentoring may feel too academic and be less engaging.

Discuss your own skills and background with your mentee. In what ways do your knowledge, skills, and experience provide added value to help your mentee reach their targeted goal? It is not uncommon that your mentee’s current role and intended growth is not exactly what you have encountered in your career. The support you provide your mentee puts you into a learning mode as well. Yet, because you have experienced organizational life, handled setbacks, managed through transitions, led others, and learned lessons through reflection and counsel, you have a lot of know-how that will be relevant. However, if the mentee’s intended area of growth is wholly foreign to you, that should be called out. If you still choose to work together, create a goal that accounts for your lack of familiarity. As an example, in my coaching work with highly trained scientists, the coaching focuses on their management and organizational skills, but not the technical ones. They still get great benefit from the coaching, but they need to complement it with access to a technical expert.

Back to Tomás and Bernice. To Bernice, shaping her draft goal based on opportunities seemed a bit challenging. Bernice worried about completing her normal duties and also assuming a more influential and collaborative role with the managers she served. Tomás helped her see how she could reshape her standard conversations with managers she already dealt with to practice new skills of gaining trust, asking high-gain questions, and diagnosing their challenges. Tomás said he was confident he could support her on this. Knowing that this was a real possibility for her growth was exhilarating for Bernice, especially recognizing Tomás’s skill. This is exactly what you hope for in a mentee’s development goal—real-time challenge accompanied by support. But before Bernice could get started, she needed to identify the scope and anticipated outcomes for her goal.

Sharpen: Define Range and Measures

Target the development goal to be challenging, yet realistic, new territory, yet defined. This will keep you focused, energized, and engaged. With too broad a scope it is frustrating to achieve it all; too small, and you will wander off into other discussions. Clarify how you will know when the development goal has been successfully achieved.

You have both taken a look at the gap and types of skills to be developed, including raising self-awareness. Now, identify what is reasonable to accomplish given the length of the program and what else is going on at work. If your mentoring relationship is open ended, select a designated time frame for this first goal, whether two, three, or five months. (Allowing open-ended timeframes for goals often leads to dwindling effort and frustration.) Break the goal into several elements to ensure you are addressing all its components. If your mentee came into mentoring hoping to make a considerable leap in role, you and your mentee might plan for gaining the specific skills that will lead to candidacy for the role as the first target. As the relationship continues, you can always add more goals. Conversely, based on the shaping conversation, new, unanticipated skills may be added to the docket.

Nothing brings the picture into clear focus like a jointly held view of what success will look like. “What success looks like” should describe what the mentee is able to do, the impact they will have on others, and the intended results to be achieved by that behavior or skill. Also consider what will be different from the impact your mentee had previously. Frame up criteria for each element; that will help evaluate the level of growth achieved. For example, if the mentee is hoping for a new role, identify which knowledge and skill set needs to be in place and how those would be successfully demonstrated as criteria for goal achievement.

At this point, the mentee documents in writing where you have arrived, and you each keep a copy. It is likely you will continue to fine-tune. In fact, some mentees further refine this document based on additional inputs from other resources, such as observing people who are proficient or speaking with someone in the know. You might also turn to reference guides that describe, in depth, what a given skill looks like when it is demonstrated proficiently (Lombardo 2009). Another accessible source for learning about skills is job-finding or recruitment websites, which lay out the details and skills needed for a specific job.

Given her in-depth discussions with Tomás, Bernice now understood that fully qualifying for a senior HR business partner role was an overreach during this six-month mentorship. Even beyond acquiring the actual skills, she realized they had to address her confidence, ability to assert herself, and comfort in advising leaders. She documented her goal with details of what skills and behaviors to address and how she and Tomás could measure success. Example 3-1 shows her development plan.

EXAMPLE 3-1

BERNICE’S MENTEE DEVELOPMENT GOAL

Bernice was surprised at the energy that went into the goal setting, and realized that the amount of clarity it provided put her that much closer to achieving results.

Tool 3-1 summarizes the steps used to create mentee development goals.

TOOL 3-1

HIGHLIGHTS OF MENTEE DEVELOPMENT GOAL SETTING

The Mentor’s (Your) Goal

Who says the learning ought to be for the mentee alone? Your relationship is in place for learning, and it goes both ways. Given your role and the seven guiding principles for successful mentoring described in step 1 and what you foresee with this particular mentee, where can you derive great learning? In managing a mentoring program, I have encountered mentors who request a mentee with big challenges, so that they, too, can be stretched as they work with those mentees. There is something to be learned through each mentoring relationship. Now, extend yourself: Purposefully come to the mentoring with a development goal of your own in mind.

Though it does not need to be as rigorous, use a modified approach to what has been described for mentee goals:

• Start: Draft an initial goal, identifying where you want your enhanced mentoring skills to be in the future, then use a gap analysis to determine what skills or knowledge will further your capabilities (as a mentor, a coach, or a manager).

• Shape: Adapt your goal given the situation and learning opportunity with this particular mentee. What is different about this mentorship that provides an opportunity to learn something new or deepen or broaden your skills (for example, mentoring will be conducted via video across great distance; the mentee is from a different field than your own; the mentee’s background is vastly different than yours)?

• Sharpen: Define the scope of anticipated learning and put behavioral measures against it. Identify actions you will be taking and how you can track progress with those, such as journaling, using high-gain questions, conferring with other mentors, receiving feedback, and applying new techniques.

In the creation and implementation of mentee development goals, the mentee has you as their advocate. In your case, I recommend fellow mentors as resources. In fact, in peer mentor groups, peers are mutually supportive in identifying what and how skills can be built during the mentoring process. Prioritize the skills you want to enhance (such as, coaching, asking high-gain questions, valuing differences) that will serve you best, based on what you anticipate with this mentee. Lois Zachery, mentoring guru, describes one mentor who realized that the upcoming mentoring relationship would benefit greatly from increased conflict-management skills. That mentor framed up a learning plan to increase her skill, including reading, interviews and lots of hands-on practice, and receiving feedback (Zachery 2012).

By creating these mentor development goals and tracking your own progress (or jointly tracking progress with fellow mentors), you will increase your engagement and motivation as well as your skill. Your mentee will experience your attentiveness. Everyone wins.

Craft a Method for Your Meetings

Given the mentoring conversations so far, some may be thinking, “OK, when does the real work begin?” Guess what … you have already done considerable real work to this point. This early phase sets you up for achieving great results in a relatively short period of time. I speak with scores of mentees and mentors after the mentoring has been completed, and over and over again they describe how valuable this early work is: getting to know each other, discussing their roles, formulating agreements, and framing the goals. In fact, in a wrap-up session for all mentors in a program in which I participated, mentors were emphatic about the significance that early contracting and goal setting had. This mentor group reported considerable accomplishments were achieved due to laying this strong foundation. In short, the actions you complete while setting the direction allows you to take the mentoring further and achieve remarkable results.

Once the mentee development goals are documented and shared, or even before they are finalized, the two of you will settle into a series of meetings. Establishing the expectations for the meetings ensures an easy flow each time to dig into the work. The predictability of the structure makes it safe and reliable for an open and grounded conversation. Now is the time to confirm your earlier agreement about your meetings (how often, how long, location) and delve deeper into what and how your conversational topics will be covered.

Each of your meetings has the potential to be a gem of a conversation, taking the mentee to new places and new insights. Structure your meetings so that your time spent together is purposeful, yet flexible enough to include ad hoc discussions. Allow yourselves to delve into some areas more deeply, especially as those discussions have potential for discovery. When you feel you’ve gone too far afield, gently bring the conversation back on track. All the while, you are moving toward goal accomplishment (Guiding Principle #4: Be flexibly goal oriented). Avoid a meeting checklist mentality, strictly adhering to every item on a detailed list. Having a checklist mentality may cause you to brush past the dynamic that is occurring between the two of you in that moment. Tool 3-2 offers a sample standard agenda that can be used for ongoing meetings.

In the most dynamic mentoring conversations, the focus is on new learning, mining experiences and their impact, increasing self-awareness, and forward thinking. Although these items are not typically called out on the agenda, these are what distinguish the mentoring conversation and make it so satisfying. It is up to each mentor to spontaneously identify and weave these callouts (such as, lessons learned from experience, impact achieved, increased self-awareness, next steps) into the conversation. That’s the magic of mentoring.

TOOL 3-2

SAMPLE MEETING AGENDA

As you work through your agenda, here is a memorable way to create the magic. Simply remember these three components: reflect, be in the now, and think forward. All three play a role:

• Reflect (to mine lessons and impact from behaviors). Have your mentee identify what stood out this past week or so: What were key interactions and the impact those had? How do those compare to similar past interactions? How did they feel going into this? What got easier or more effective? What new challenges were encountered? What made a difference?

• Be in the now (to introspect, practice identifying true feelings, and connect that to how it could be driving behavior, to identify what you are noticing in your own conversations). Have the mentee consider: What are their current thoughts and feelings as they describe the standout incidences of the week? What do those feelings tell them? How are they feeling about the conversation you are having? How is this conversation benefitting them? Where else would they like to take the conversation?

• Think forward (to motivate enhanced behaviors or interactions). Have the mentee think about: How can they handle a similar situation next time? How can they tune in internally (that is, mindset and feelings) to manage themselves most effectively? What other preparation will help them do a stellar job (for example, talk with certain people, prepare a document, research)?

As we have just highlighted, agreeing on how a typical meeting flows is essential to the success of your ongoing mentoring conversations. Yet, be aware that your meetings represent only a portion of the time your mentee spends in their overall development mentoring process.

Establish the Expectation of Momentum Between Meetings

It is natural for mentors to assume that much of the work of mentoring occurs in the meetings you have together. However, for the mentee, the work should be continuous. In fact, your mentee should feel they are in development mode most days, punctuated by mentoring meetings as the opportunity to do deep dives of exploration. What goes on in between your meetings is where experience, interactions, and observations happen, and that’s the stuff of the great conversations you are having.

Help your mentee see that they are in ongoing learning mode. You can reinforce this by discussing, in the early part of your conversations, what has occurred over the last couple weeks since you’ve seen each other. If your mentee does not have much to say when you first start your mentoring, persist with this at each meeting, and they will get it. They will then use the “in-between time” to do their development in action. In my book Make Talent Your Business: How Exceptional Managers Develop People While Getting Results (co-authored with Jeannie Coyle), a big theme is “make every day a development day.” With the right mindset, your mentee can turn cranking out work into performing work with development in mind. It transforms many moments of the day into an exploration, a test of new behaviors, keen inspection of others who are masters at their work, and self-observation.

Bookend your conversations by identifying what kinds of experiences, interactions, and reflections will be beneficial between this meeting and the next. This way, you are establishing the fieldwork assignment, with both of you designing it. Regularly use the mentoring goal to guide the selection of those learning assignments.

This approach is very developmentally rich compared to a process where the mentor teaches or gives lessons on topics of interest and has the mentee read articles or books on the subject between meetings. This is not to say that articles, books, and other resources should be avoided; quite the contrary. It is to say that mentoring ought to be about live action, not simply topical, content driven, or academic, even if those resources are interesting. That will miss the main point for potential growth, which requires experimentation, taking risks, and increasing self-awareness.

Tool 3-3 lists potential ideas for encouraging growth between meetings; select from these or create your own to provide the best learning options for your mentee at each stage of growth during your mentoring.

TOOL 3-3

DEVELOPMENT OPTIONS FOR MENTEES BETWEEN MENTORING MEETINGS

Now, back to Tomás and Bernice. Once Bernice had set her development goals, Tomás and Bernice established a regular rhythm to their twice monthly meetings. During their conversations, Bernice and Tomás explored her real-time successes and challenges with adapting the new behaviors. They discussed what it will take to influence her clients and gain recognition as their thinking partner. In between meetings, for her fieldwork, she wrote down practical yet thought-provoking questions for her client discussions. She practiced with a colleague how to turn client resistance into productive conversation. She also gauged client reactions and her own reactions to their comments. She got better and better at reading her own internal state of mind; being conscious of her mindset helped her to avoid reverting to her timid behavior.

Tomás provided perspective on what she might encounter with clients and how long it might take to see changes in their response to her. He provided feedback on her progress, which boosted her confidence. He also gave her accolades regarding her eagerness and fortitude to explore her mindset and emotions during their conversations. She felt far more willing to take on behaviors she had previously felt were too risky, as the two of them continued to identify progressive stretch actions. The momentum onward felt exhilarating. All the while, they constantly tuned into her goal statements to monitor progress. After a short couple months, she identified the extent to which clients were now using her to think through their HR concerns. Development in motion!

The Next Step

During your last couple meetings, you and your mentee have created a clear path forward by thoughtfully creating mentoring development goals and identifying what will occur both in and between your meetings. Now you can really dig into a regular cadence of meetings where successes and challenges will be discussed, insights uncovered, and progress toward achieving goals will be tracked. Going forward, there are a number of powerful mentor approaches to be used that will strengthen your process. Though there is not a particular stepwise sequence to these, what follows next is step 4 (Leverage Experiences for Development). The core concept here is that learning is not true development until it is applied. Helping your mentee apply what they are learning through experiences is crucial to their mastery, and there are practical ways you can make this process highly valuable.