Mentoring: Ask, Don't Tell

Great managers mentor, right? But how do they find the time? Great managers inevitably take on more responsibility, and lead bigger teams, and add more value and ...

Paraphrasing a lot of books and experience, the best outcome of mentoring is not in answering a question, or unblocking a project, but in empowering learners to answer questions and unblock projects without depending on mentors. Great managers focus on team effectiveness without building codependency.

In his book, The Coaching Habit, Michael Bungay Stanier suggests that the best coaching can be accomplished by asking seven essential questions, designed to help the learner solve a challenge, rather than reusing the manager's experience or knowledge to solve it.

1. Kickstart: "What's on your mind?" - Starts an open conversation.
2. AWE: "And What Else?" - Identifies the right issue to be discussed.
3. Focus: "What is the real challenge in this for you?" - Limits scope to what is important and actionable.
4. Foundation: "What do you want?" - Clarifies objectives, motivation, needs vs. wants.
5. Lazy: "What do you want from me?" - Minimizes the solution to a specific ask.
6. Strategy: "What do we have to say 'no' to for us to say 'yes' to this?" - Considers costs, impacts and alternatives for better decision making.
7. Learning: "What was most valuable for you from this?" - Reinforces the coaching.

The three challenges in effective mentoring are in minimizing advice (lecture), not solving the problem for the learner (rescue), and allowing the learner to learn (patience).

Great managers can use mentoring to protect their time. Every question asked of a manager is either Aligned or Unaligned to the manager's important deliverables. Unaligned questions are Mentoring opportunities. Where answering the question encourages more questions, mentoring minimizes the need for additional questions. No wonder they get so much done!