Introduction

“You might already know we’ve been having incredible success with our mentoring program, and it’s grown tremendously with each new cycle,” Peter, a company senior leader, told Gayle. “And we’d like you to be part of our next cohort. What would you say to becoming a mentor to a rising-star professional?” Gayle took a deep breath. She had heard great press about the program, but never considered joining.

Gayle had always prided herself on being a team player, sacrificing her own interests to take on new projects. As an engineer for a large software company near Philadelphia, she had thrown herself into her work for more than a decade. She had even passed up a new management opportunity, committed to seeing her project and team through to the finish line of a significant new product offering. Only recently had she begun to worry if she’d made a mistake. “When,” Gayle wondered, “will I get the chance to invest in myself?”

Mulling it over for a few moments, Gayle shared her reservations. “My life is already filled with taking care of others. I manage one group, and, as you know, I’m also leading our latest offering, which launches in a few months. I have two children at home, plus I’m helping my dad find a new place to live. Mentoring hardly fits the bill of my next big experience. Not to sound selfish, but if I take on something new right now, it should be something I can do for myself—to learn, feel enriched, and sink my teeth into.”

“Precisely!” Peter responded. Gayle didn’t understand. Mentoring, she assumed, would simply mean more work for her; yet another person to give herself to, with little in it for her. “This mentoring process has much more to it than you probably realize,” Peter added, recognizing the confusion in Gayle’s expression. “Yes, it’s an opportunity to develop a fellow professional. But it’s also an opportunity to invest in yourself. I know when I served as a mentor two years ago, I discovered my tendency was to solve every problem my mentee had, rather than listen—really listen. Then I learned to ask important questions and help him figure it out on his own, and even help him become more self-aware and take some leaps forward in challenges he faced. I got a lot out of exploring things from his vantage point; it was all totally eye-opening for me. That’s what we’ve been building here—an environment where not only mentees, but also mentors, are supported to enhance their skills and learn more about themselves. In fact, we have mentors who insist on being included for each new round of the program.”

Suddenly, Gayle was intrigued. She had, after all, been looking for a fresh adventure—the cycling club and woodworking classes hadn’t cut it. She left her meeting with Peter undecided; maybe becoming a mentor was just what she needed. What would she do?

Substantial Rewards Await You

The best mentoring leaves a positive and enduring impact on the mentee. It provides the mentee a secure environment to explore aspirations, think more broadly, and behave with far greater effectiveness. But while the process of mentoring typically focuses on the mentee, this book is fervently and enthusiastically dedicated to you … the mentor.

The most seasoned and successful mentors know it is not their expertise and years of problem solving that create the basis for their best work as a mentor. It is much more about how they engage their mentee, requiring mentors to learn and apply specific growth-promoting approaches. Those focused methods are what led to their mentee’s outstanding development. In fact, an important study of company mentoring programs shows that the level of support and learning mentors receive correlates with the level of the results achieved in their mentoring (ATD 2017). Discovering new development methods not only increases your skill, but it also leads to considerably better results for your mentee—a win-win. Increasing your capabilities as a mentor is what this book is all about.

The investment you make to become an outstanding mentor will pay big dividends, beyond the wonderful satisfaction of just helping another. Brenda Dear, the former HR executive with IBM who revitalized their multimillion-dollar mentoring program, is a breathing Wikipedia of the benefits of mentoring for mentors as well as their companies. Both fortunate and grateful for her years of mentoring, she viewed it as crucial in her career—an opportunity to share and learn across job functions, cultures, and generations. Said Brenda: “Mentoring provided me the opportunity to remain connected, to stay relevant, and to be a valuable contributor to the organization” (MentorCloud 2014).

No question, mentoring is very gratifying; and with more mentoring relationships accumulated over time, you will find an expansion of benefits accrued. Based upon research and my years of experience, here are the primary benefits mentors report:

• Enhance your career. Mentors get good practice and fine-tune skills such as listening, asking thought-provoking questions, facilitating change, influencing, and overcoming obstacles. Look closely, and you’ll notice that these skills are the same required to be an exceptional leader. Your willingness to mentor will get the attention of others, whether in your company or elsewhere, and can lead to offers of broader opportunities. A well-researched and frequently cited study from Sun Microsystems indicates that those being mentored are not the only ones who move up in their career; mentors also were five times more likely to receive increased salary grades than their nonmentoring peers (Morrison 2014).

• Learn what it takes to develop others. Committing to this role means you are dedicated to develop someone in significant ways. Your mentee’s lasting growth requires myriad developmental actions you will need to take: recognizing your mentee’s strengths and weaknesses, identifying what new skills will be learned, addressing obstacles, expanding perspectives, testing new behaviors, reflecting on impact, and perfecting their skills through repeated application. Outside of your daily role, mentoring becomes a safe place to try new developmental approaches without the scrutiny of organizational requirements and policies. You grow as you help another develop.

• Stay relevant. Methods, research, and tools change in every discipline over time; the pace seems to get faster and faster. The change, for example, could mean a greater focus on analytics, or use of new communications protocols for working with internal clients. If you have a decade or more of experience and your mentee has less, you can learn from what is currently happening in your field at the ground level. You may also gain knowledge about personal attributes mentees need to have, such as greater flexibility in a world less certain than the one you had earlier in your career. As an example, John Barrows is keenly focused on staying relevant and relies on Morgan, who is 16 years younger, to help educate him. “I grew up and still live in a Microsoft world (PC, Word, Excel, PowerPoint), which Morgan’s generation views as archaic. So he’s teaching me (forcing me) to use Google Docs, Slack, and other collaborative tools, not only to improve our communication but also to help me work more effectively with others in his cohort and to be more relevant in their eyes” (Barrows 2017).

• Gain new perspectives. Through the numerous conversations with your mentee about carrying out their daily responsibilities, you will learn their values and perspectives on many aspects of work life and life as a whole. Whether the two of you have dissimilarities due to different backgrounds, upbringing, education, or generation, consider this your opportunity to challenge the way you typically look at things and expand your own world view. Seeing familiarities in a new light will broaden your possibilities. Learning from your mentee and appreciating their way of thinking actually increases your mutual trust and respect. I received a comment from a mentor during a pulse survey that typifies how mentors view this: “Viewing the world through others’ eyes continues to strengthen my strategic value.”

• Learn more about yourself. During conversations with your mentee, “listen” to what questions you are asking, what assumptions you are making, what you find disturbing in the conversations, and what advice you offer. Use this for self-reflection. What do all of these say about you: your interests, your ways of operating, and your “go-to” ideas? And, more directly, you can ask mentee for feedback; seeing yourself from their perspective can be quite revealing.

Reaching New Heights as a Mentor

During my junior year in college, I realized that my life’s ambition was to work with people to help them become their most accomplished self. While my fellow psychology-major peers were headed into clinical psychology, I veered in another direction. Though scarcely knowing what it was all about, I dove into a deep learning, gaining an education and experiences to attain a PhD in organizational psychology. What I loved about that period was leveraging the classes and concepts during my consulting work conducted with my major professors, learning from experience and with others. The learning gained was not simply in my head, it was also in my gut, my hands, and in my bones! I was passionate about developing others, but not simply based on book learning. What followed was years devoted to organizational, leader, and people development, as well as original research with Jeannie Coyle about how some managers were truly exceptional at developing their people. All that culminated in our book Make Talent Your Business: How Exceptional Managers Develop People While Getting Results (Axelrod and Coyle 2011).

The enduring fascination with development seeped into my volunteer life. As president of a human resources association in Greater Philadelphia (now Philadelphia Society for People and Strategy), I initiated and led a mentoring program for early-in-career professionals, now in its 17th year, graduating scores of mentees who have gone onto highly successful careers. Along with my colleagues who helped to implement the program, and as mentors ourselves, we learned and experimented with what really made the biggest impact for mentee and mentor growth (Axelrod 2012). It has been an incredible playground for learning and uncovering what occurs in superb mentoring and how to achieve remarkable outcomes.

Mentoring others is not to be taken lightly; we have a significant responsibility and enormous influence. Continuing to grow and develop ourselves not only enriches our mentees, but it also enhances our relationships at work and at home. With a positive ripple effect, the better we become at mentoring, the more the world around us also changes for the better. Like finding a superb high-yield mutual fund, the investment we make in our own development pays big dividends, and we get to share that with others.

How to Use This Book

If you have mentored before or if this is your first time, from this book you will learn how to unlock your own motivations for mentoring, collaboratively shape a learning contract, establish a relationship of trust, and confidently ask thought-provoking questions that help your mentees see a new path. You will discover how to use a variety of learning approaches with your mentees, apply psychology and neuroscience with your mentee to uncover insights, leverage day-to-day work experiences as a learning lab, and more. As a result, you will provide a safe and rich environment for in-depth conversations that readies your mentee to take risks, try new behaviors, and reach for bigger aspirations. The outcome of this type of mentoring is a path to increased capabilities, heightened self-awareness, confidence with courageous actions, and gratifying career growth.

10 Steps to Successful Mentoring is filled with scores of tools, models, and questions that will give you encouragement to use new methods with confidence. You will also find dozens of real examples (with the names and job titles changed), highlighting the approaches that turn mentor challenges into successful results. For the new or seasoned mentor, this book will guide you through the process, but not in a mechanical, cookbook fashion. There can be no “follow these steps, one by one, and every time you will get this fantastic outcome.” Every mentee is unique, requiring you to keep your eye on the process as it unfolds, and grow in your own skill set. There will be surprises, frustrations, delights, and unexpected impacts. Learning from the mentoring process in this book promises a lifetime of memorable experiences for your mentee and a lasting legacy for yourself. Plan to not only succeed as a mentor, but also truly excel and change lives.

Here is how the book is organized to support you.

The starting elements of the mentoring, the first three steps, help to create a robust foundation so you and your mentee are positioned for a supportive and deliberate development process.

• Step 1: Prepare for Your Role. The role of the mentor is often unintentionally misrepresented in theory and in practice. This chapter distinguishes it from other development-focused roles. It offers seven guiding principles of successful mentoring, which create a basis for your process. It aims to help you understand your motivation to be a mentor and provides a readiness checklist.

• Step 2: Establish the Relationship. As in any relationship, the mentor-mentee dynamic necessitates that you get to know each other. This chapter focuses on finding common ground, identifying your roles and expectations, setting the tone for ongoing in-depth work together, and deciding what to cover in the early meetings.

• Step 3: Set the Direction. Too many mentoring relationships begin enthusiastically, only to be derailed when mentors and mentees don’t establish useful goals. This chapter suggests how mentee goals are shaped to stretch your mentee while also allowing them to have real-time opportunities to apply what they are learning. It also guides the identification of your own goals, helping you to establish a protocol and structure for your conversations and what will occur between meetings.

The methods and approaches you will use throughout the mentoring process that lead to remarkable results are contained in steps 4 through 7. There is no distinct step-wise order. At one time or another you will need to draw from them all; in fact, several will occur simultaneously in your mentoring conversations. Mastering these methods will set you apart from other mentors and create high impact for your mentee and yourself.

• Step 4: Leverage Experience for Development. Experience is a great teacher when it is properly shaped for the right lessons. Help your mentee to examine the possibilities, field-test new approaches, enlist others for insight and feedback, and extract the learning.

• Step 5: Expand Growth Using Everyday Psychology. Creating lasting growth needs to be personally geared to the makeup of the individual. The keys are understanding emotions and neuroscience, knowing oneself, knowing your mentee, creating safety, and raising self-awareness.

• Step 6: Elevate the Power of Questions. What happens when you formulate the right inquiry, step back, and listen to your mentee? You both end up learning more. This chapter shows you how to construct questions to make them thoughtful, developmental, and engaging, while also gearing them around the different types of learning. It also stresses how to convey challenging questions with respect and compassion, and knowing what questions to ask yourself to become more expert.

• Step 7: Diversify the Development Methods. What helps spur development in one mentee may not be the same for others. You will need to understand the right fit for your mentee, tap into the variety of useful development options, and diversify your own development during this process.

Once the relationship is well established and there is a rhythm to the mentoring, push further to truly stretch your mentee and yourself. Your mentee will benefit from influencing others to enrich and widely apply their new skills. There is an opportunity for you to stretch even further too, with a chapter dedicated to helping you address knotty mentoring challenges. Even with persistent obstacles, the best mentors know how create success.

• Step 8: Promote Influence Skills. Mentees need to expand their influence abilities the further they take their careers. Help your mentee to recognize influence opportunities and challenges, enhance four crucial influence skills, and progressively strengthen influence.

• Step 9: Address Mentor Challenges. Do exceptional mentors write off challenging mentees as unsalvageable? No. They instead see the situation as a golden opportunity to grow. This chapter provides support for neutralizing four mentoring relationship roadblocks, succeeding with mentees who are challenging, and managing outside influencers.

Whether your process has been six months or more than two years, the final elements of your mentoring needs to be as productive as any other step. It solidifies the relationship and lessons learned, and points to direction for the future.

• Step 10: Consolidate Learning and Bring Closure. For both mentor and mentee, this is the crucial last phase of the work together and includes steps involved with anticipating closure, individually preparing for the wrap-up conversation, conducting the wrap-up conversation (including what’s next), and consolidating the lessons of your own experience as a mentor.

The Next Step

Now the journey, with this book as your guide, gets underway. In the next chapter you will dive into what it takes to fully prepare for your role as mentor: understanding your role, your motivation, guiding principles, and the typical phases of mentoring. This step lays a foundation for a remarkable experience. You are destined to continually grow as an exceptional mentor!