Keeping ‘eyes on the prize’ when mentoring someone with an audacious goal

London, June 2018: It was a hot summer’s day, and with my mentee I celebrated their achieving one of their ambitions. My mentee credited my support in helping them achieve this, although it was through their own determination that they had succeeded.

How did my mentoring help? My mentee says that it was the goal-orientated technique I used and it is this that I’m sharing below.

The specific goal technique that I have used with some of my mentees. It’s a technique works well where a mentee has an audacious goal that have several facets to its achievement as well as being stretching.

This particular mentee had a goal that met these criteria. They were focused on achieving it but were not sure of the path that needed to be taken to achieve it.

Re-winding to the start of the story:

As a bit of background (and with their permission), they were in their mid-40s, they had been made redundant in a global downturn for their sector. Whilst they’d managed to make a switch to a new sector, they were struggling to adapt - failure was quite possible - and also absolutely clear that if they had to retrain again in their 50s they were going to do if from a better position of strength. Their goal was connected to strengthening their future options. In amongst their thoughts for this was a vision of winning a National Award in their field, which possibly stunned both of us, until we got to creating a clearer understanding of what it would take to seize that opportunity.

With a large goal it is common to break it down into sub-goals. We did the same here, and in doing so it became clear that some of the sub-goals were audacious in themselves (at least from my perspective). So whilst understanding the sub-goals was helpful it still didn’t define the path. Quite the opposite, there were many paths that needed to be taken that would meet up at the over-arching goal.

So what did I help my mentee with progressing their bold vision?

I took a leaf out of my project management manual and gave a goal-based project management technique a go. I started to arrange the notes I was taking into a goal-directed plan (GDP). GDP as a technique focuses on the sub-goals and how they define the path to attaining the over-arching goal. There are absolutely no GANTT charts involved!

I asked my mentee if they could write down all stepping-stones they planned to use to achieve the over-arching goal. Some of the stepping-stones were large and all the stepping-stones involved many activities to complete them. Once we had these down on Post-It notes*, I asked them to group the Post-Its* by what they were achieving (that is, group by what sub-goal they related to). Then within each group to order the notes by how the stepping-stones related to each other in time.

In doing this, each group of stepping-stones defined a path to a sub-goal; it became easier to see which paths were dependent upon stepping-stones in other paths; and which stepping-stones maybe didn’t add too much towards achieving the over-arching goal. Each path was clearly defined, without being planned to great detail. Given the stepping-stones involved many activities and possible changes of plan, this kept getting to each stepping-stone and path flexible. Detail planning would have meant too much re-planning whenever circumstances changed, and probably would have been demotivational!

It showed my mentee that perhaps their bold aim of winning a National Award wasn’t as crazy as might be thought (they weren’t convinced at the start). 

But perhaps the biggest reason to map the stepping-stones and sub-goals to the over-arching goal this way was that is a very visual technique; that is simple to share with others; and keeps the focus on what’s important. Post-It notes* on a wall aren’t easy to carry around with you, but there were perhaps 25 stepping-stones, grouped into five paths leading to the over-arching goal. It was quick and easy to put this in a table that would fit an A4 page.

This is what made maintaining and sharing it easy. My mentee would update it with progress before every meeting we had. If getting to a stepping-stone had fallen behind, they would colour them red; those that were complete they coloured green. And on one A4 page we could both see how things were progressing and it would focus where our mentoring discussion went.

The GDP plan helped keep “eyes on the prize” and hopefully it was also motivational visually as more stepping-stones turned green.

And how did it work out? Well, that’s back to celebrating an ambition achieved on a hot summer’s day in June 2018.

My mentee credited developing and using a GDP with helping them achieve their over-arching goal considerably earlier than they had originally planned – although I credit them with all their effort and time they put into realising their vision. The GDP just helped focus on what was needed along the way.

Postscript: My mentee since taken the approach and applied it to their mentees, including one who has “astronaut” as their audacious goal.

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In a future article I’ll talk about what started on that day in June 2018: pirate mentoring, when my mentee and I switched places and they decided to try out a new technique on me. Don’t worry, it was my idea and it ended well!

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