Mentoring Take-Aways

On today's Mentor Q&A session, we discussed how a mentor might wrap-up the engagement with his mentee. The easiest ways is just to tell your mentee. But when I thought about it, I realized that I was gaining as much from these sessions as my partner. We've been meeting weekly for almost 2 months, and you'd think we'd run out of topics. Not so. My partner brings a specific topic to each session and we work it. The reward is in being able to address issues objectively, whereas in the workplace, being emotionally involved in an issue can cloud your thinking. It's like observing your past experiences from the outside, rather than from within.

But it also helps to have a good mentee. In our first session he listed a number of topics he wanted addressed: sales, career, projects, quotes, practices, staffing, etc. So we agreed to meet weekly and to pick one of the topics each week. He's done that, and most weeks telegraphs it ahead of time. Having a specific topic for the meeting, and a little time to prepare, makes it that much easier and meaningful for me as a mentor. As we get to know each other, the topics build up context. I drove away today thinking that we don't need to arbitrarily end our sessions. We'll know when that time is right - when we've run out of specific topics. Until then it's worth the investment.

These experiences provide a few good take-aways for future mentors, being:

1. Negotiate goals at the first session - as Debbie pointed out during the kickoff
2. Focus each session by agreeing on a topic in advance
   
3. Create continuity, context and familiarity through weekly sessions
   
4. When topics become scarce, reduce the frequency or wind-up the sessions
5. And most important: maintain a weekly blog so that you can share your experiences

Two more tips to consider:

• Starbucks is a good venue. It's noisy, but addresses our basic needs: caffiene, wifi, 'food', lots of people, free-songs-Tuesdays
• It's OK to discuss off-topic subjects: the bailout, elections, sports. I'm not saying we discuss them and I'm not saying we don't. I'm saying it's OK.

Regards to all,

Joe Longo