5 Key Skills to be a Successful Mentor

Many of us aspire to be successful mentors and support our mentees as best as we can. Julie Starr is a leading thought leader in coaching and mentoring and has written the guidebook for good mentoring practice called The Mentoring Manual. In my latest LinkedIn article, I have shared the key bits of insight and advice in her book for anyone who wants to gain a summary of key mentoring skills needed to be a successful mentor.

Definition of a mentor: 

Mentoring isn’t about changing someone, or getting someone to do something differently, it’s about waking someone up to who they really are. The mentor’s challenge is to distill their own experience into bite sized chunks of wisdom, help or guidance in ways that ultimately help them to discover that’ - Julie Starr

Overview of mentoring:

Mentoring is a distinct relationship where one person (the mentor) supports the learning, development and progress of another person (the mentee). A mentor provides support by offering information, advice and assistance in a way that empowers the mentee. 

Effective mentor checklist:

How do you know you are an effective mentor? 

Your handling of the process:

• Do you keep your agreements e.g. arrive for sessions on time, send information as promised etc.
• Do you appear engaged in the process e.g. appear positive and optimistic in relation to the sessions, or do you appear unenthusiastic, often cancel at the last minute etc.
• Do you appear committed to the mentee’s progress e.g. demonstrate interest in them and their challenges, share personal learning and insight etc.

Your approach: 

• Do you share personal and professional information in support of the mentee's progress and learning?
• Do you demonstrate an understanding of the operating principle of mentoring e.g. encourage the mentee to retain responsibility for their learning?
• Do you focus on barriers and blocks in order to help the mentee remove them?

Your behavioural skill:

• Do you build rapport easily i.e. do you put the mentee at their ease, promote openness and trust?
• Do you bring appropriate levels of challenge to conversations e.g. observations, options and constructive feedback?
• Do you facilitate the mentee’s thinking processes e.g. through effective listening, offering summaries, asking open questions etc.

5 key mentoring skills:

1. Connecting through effective listening 
2. Build a relationship of engagement and trust 
3. Maintain an effective focus 
4. Help overcome false limits, roadblocks or barriers to progress 
5. Help someone grow 

1) Connecting through effective listening 

For you to be a really effective mentor you need to have a level of personal investment in the relationship e.g. to be engaged in the potential of the mentee to do well and prosper. Your relationship needs to have appropriate boundaries e.g. it needs to be one that blends warmth and commitment with objectivity and discernment. Your relationship may or may not feel like a friendship i.e. the quality of friendship does not define whether or not a relationship is a mentoring one or not. In other words, you may experience a sense of friendship within some relationship and those relationships may or may not have a mentoring element to them. 

When you listen effectively you are able to: 

• Gain a clear sense of what an individual is saying e.g. identify the key points of facts being offered. 
• Connect with people personally e.g. as you increase your focus upon them. 
• Build rapport and relationship quickly e.g. as people sense they are being listened to, they feel valued by that. 
• Help people communicate more clearly e.g. as they notice they are being listened to, they can relax and speak naturally. 
• Read the subtle qualities of someone’s conversation e.g. what is not being said here. 
• Build and display greater empathy as you are able to notice someone’s feeling or values e.g. that seems like something that’s naturally very important to you. 
• Adapt conversations to increase relevance and efficiency e.g. so from what you’ve said maybe we need to help you refine where you ultimately want to be rather than dwelling on your current role. 

What forms your ability to listen is a combination of attention (what we focused on) and your intention (what your motivation is in the moment). Effective listening is like a muscle you develop over time. 

The effectiveness of your listening relates to what is important in the conversation. In the context of mentoring what is important includes: 

• To maintain an effective focus for the conversation e.g. upon what’s relevant and important. 
• To enable someone to feel listened to, relax a little, trust and to be able to discuss topics openly. 
• To gain an effective understanding of both your mentee and their situations. 

2) Build a relationship of engagement and trust

Here are some simple things you can do to encourage engagement and openness in your mentoring relationships: 

• Discuss the topic of confidentiality up front e.g. confirm that the content of your discussion will be shared with no external party except by prior agreement. 
• Outside of sessions, maintain integrity e.g. use the principle I won’t say anything about my mentee that I wouldn’t be comfortable to have them hear afterwards. 
• Be willing to share some personal information and data e.g. about your partner, family, interests, hobbies etc. 
• Understand what drives and motivates your mentee, get to know them, their likes, dislikes etc. Existing profiling can help e.g. Myers-Briggs or similar.
• Review effectiveness of the mentoring discussions regularly e.g. How are these discussions meeting your expectations? What’s working / not working? What else do you need? 

The purpose of any mentoring conversation is to benefit the mentee in some way and the link or relevance back to them must be maintained. 

3) Maintain an effective focus 

By effective focus we are talking about:

• Help to identify what is important for your mentee to work on i.e. their priorities. 
• Facilitate conversations with your mentee in a way that helps them to gain the most value from those conversations. 
• Keep sight of the overall assignment themes e.g. career development, building confidence etc. within individual mentoring conversations. 
• Notice distractions or conventional wandering that are likely to be counterproductive or unsupportive of your mentee’s progress. 
• Encourage a focus on topics that benefit your mentee’s ultimate success, including those that might be challenging e.g. your mentee’s tendency to procrastinate, or avoid confrontation. 
• Stay flexible and creative within conversations, to maintain challenge and progress (avoid unhealthy repetition or routine). 

Mentoring does not happen in a vacuum, it happens as part of real life. Mentoring assignments often begin well. They then continue against a backdrop of everyday events, challenges, and change. These unexpected elements may then cause the conversation to shift emphasis, or alter in nature. This is not a problem but merely a potential pitfall you need to be comfortable with. Also as warmth and ease within your relationship build, there is an opportunity for your conversations to wander, drift or simply become cosy. For example, your discussion gets distracted by story telling or as you both try to fix everyday issues. In the diversion, the initial intentions of the relationship can get lost. 

As a mentor you have a balance to maintain: 

• You want to maintain the relationship with the mentee e.g. promote trust and engagement. 
• You need to keep sight of the stated goals of the mentee and encourage awareness of those e.g. increasing the mentee’s tolerance of pressure and ability to take risks. 
• You need to be open to adapting the focus of the assignment if that is not appropriate. 

It’s also likely that everyday events present enablers of learning to which you can make links in the mentoring conversation. For example:

• I can see a real opportunity here for you to reshape the business more towards what you said you want it. 
• This situation actually matches your development themes perfectly doesn’t it? I can really get that. 
• For me, the development links to your goal of handling pressure and taking risks, which is interesting. 

4) Help overcome false limits, roadblocks or barriers to progress 

If a mentor is a travelling companion for part of the mentee’s journey, then some of the function they perform is to help remove roadblocks to the mentee’s progress along the way. Examples of the block and barriers that you might want to help them overcome include: 

• Professional awareness: e.g. how do I read a profit and loss account? Or what is the difference between creativity and innovation?
• Connections, relationships e.g. having a network of people who can link them to opportunities to assistance. 
• Barriers related to limited thinking of beliefs e.g. I can’t build a business on my own because I don’t have the right education/experience/background. 

Your role is to help them make progress in their current situation with their current goals. Your role is to empower them, i.e. equip them to deal with future challenges. The most significant risk to their progress appears to be their lack of experience of a business that has individual customers at the heart of it (and you’re not sure how that risk may present itself). Their success will rest upon their ability to sustain positive communication and engagement with their team (as they are relying on their team to make this work). If you are to help them, they need to engage with and trust your view. 

5) Help someone grow 

One of the principal functions of a mentor is to help someone grow. By grow we mean through the process of being mentored a person can: 

• Increase their knowledge, wisdom and awareness. 
• Increase their sense of maturity i.e. that they appear experienced and emotionally well balanced to others. 
• Enlarge their view of the world or broaden their perspectives in a way that they can draw upon e.g. here’s another way of looking at this. 

For example:

• Without mentoring support the owner’s perspectives/beliefs are shaped by experience e.g. facing challenges and overcoming them, or having problems and fixing them. With mentoring support, the owner’s perspective is blended with or drawn from the viewpoints of the mentor e.g. what do you think and so what do I think? 
• Without mentoring support learning is mostly self generated e.g. by what happens and doesn’t happen or self reflection caused by own natural tendencies such as I tend to mull things over a lot. With mentoring support, learning is encouraged by the increased emphasis and focus created by the mentoring conversations e.g. as the owner’s new role influences the topics discussed.
• Without mentoring support, personal wisdom and insight are encouraged through internal processes, such as self reflection and contemplation. This may arise less consciously as a passing thought or idea. With mentoring support wisdom and insight are encouraged by the process of speaking to someone else and driven by the intentions born from the conversations e.g. what do they think about this and do I agree with that.

If you enjoyed and valued this article you may also like my other article around key coaching skills needed to be a successful coach according to Julie Starr