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Benefits of Learning From Mentoring
This article Benefits of Learning From Mentoring explains more about the method of mentoring from a learner’s viewpoint.
In particular, it concentrates on what a learner needs to do to make the most out of a mentoring association, and the experiences that you will need to use to maintain the relationship.
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At the start, likely, the mentoring relationship will principally be controlled by the mentor who will take accountability for managing the process.
But, as the relationship grows and develops, you, as the learner, will presumably increasingly take charge to secure that it focuses on your learning demands.
The Essential Qualification Is An Open Mind.
The key skill from the learner’s point of view is to be prepared to learn.
It benefits from having some idea about your learning style so that you can request your mentor to work in a direction that will assist you in learning best.
Choosing a Mentor
Choosing a mentor requires to be a positive process, not a submissive acceptance of a forced pairing.
If your company is operating a mentoring programme, it will probably have a process that will offer you a variety of mentors.
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If so, you should think deliberately about what learning each one can deliver, as well as what you might be ready to learn from and with them.
Talk To Potential Mentors
Explain to them that you’re exploring if a mentoring relationship with them would work for you.
You can’t judge without meeting the mentor face-to-face, and you’ve got to be confident that you could study with them.
You’re will be exploring your learning, what you need to achieve from your career, what you’ve performed well and what you’ve done poorly, and so on.
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Some of those reviews will involve personal thoughts and experiences, so it’s essential that you feel that you can trust them.
Warning!
Don’t reject any potential mentor because they aren’t actually what you were anticipating.
A possible mentor doesn’t necessarily have to be someone superior to you.
They may be at your level, or even below, but much superior than you at particular skills.
If your organisation has a comparable process, and you have been comparable with that person, there is a purpose.
Go and examine it. You may be overwhelmed.
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There are no hard-and-fast rules concerning whether mentoring relationships work best with comparable people or opposing types.
The important point is whether you’re ready to try it, and see how it goes.
What Do You Want To Achieve?
You will also find it important to think through what you want to learn from the mentoring relationship.
The most productive way to perform this is to commence broadly by reasoning about questions such as:
What intrigues me?
Where do I require to go?
What do I require to learn to move in this direction?
You may also find it convenient to think about whether you require your mentoring relationship to concentrate on a wider area, such as your career inside the organisation.
It may also be your skills development with a glimpse to a change in career, or something more conventional such as the way that you are running a particular project or assignment.
This will help you think about how long-drawn you require the association to last.
A personal SWOT analysis can aid you in identifying areas of weakness and a potential locus for the mentoring relationship.
This can additionally usefully help into your choice of the mentor, and if you want someone who will complement your areas of vulnerability or someone who is ordinarily quite like you and will conjecture where you struggle.
A Personal SWOT Analysis
This will glance at your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, and assist you in identifying the centre for your learning:
Strengths involve your experience, qualifications, skills, talents, and personal qualities.
Weaknesses are any features of these in which you think you have a deficiency that is affecting you in your work.
Opportunities are circumstances in your environment, such as new projects coming up, career opportunities, time and space and opportunities for training and improvement.
Threats are the factors in your background that might restrict you or keep you back.
Skills To Use During The Mentoring Relationship
A person will profit from developing their emotional intelligence to recognise their emotions and sentiments as well as those of other abandon around them – such as their mentor.
This will assist you to get the most out of the mentoring relationship.
Cultivating your ability to ponder on your learning will also be effective, and will be bolstered by an end-of-session review method with your mentor.
If you don’t already use contemplative practice routinely, then it can feel like a somewhat odd process, but it is well worth attempting.
This may be something that your mentor could support you to develop, by using it with you during the sessions to assist you to reflect on issues at work and what you have learned from them.
You may require to provide and receive feedback.
This may be especially difficult if the relationship is not working as well as you had expected and you need to provide feedback about the manner that your mentor is working.
Take this as a learning opportunity, and it will be much more comfortable to approach.
A Concluding Word of Advice
All mentoring relationships do not work.
Even with the best intention, some mentoring relationships are much more productive than others, and others work fine at specific times or for a short period.
It is often not feaseble to know beforehand, which will work best, or how long a productive relationship will endure because such relationships depend enormously on the dynamics between partners.
It’s difficult but as a learner, if the association is not striving, and you don’t feel that you’re receiving what you want out of it, then sometimes the best thing to do is to abandon it.
Under these circumstances, you require to be honest that it’s just not serving for you, and you’d rather locate another mentor.
Much pleasanter that than wasting your own and your mentor’s time any more.
