A successful mentoring relationship benefits not only the mentee, but enhances the mentor’s leadership repertoire as well
By Lis Merrick
Having worked on the design and development of many mentoring programmes, I am still amazed at both the mentor’s development and the enhancement of their leadership behaviour. We pitch developmental mentoring as a two-way learning relationship and the benefits for a receptive mentor can be as great as for the mentee. Organisations are increasingly latching on to this.
Interest is manifesting itself in programme design, with some organisations running additional leadership modules for the mentors to ensure they feel more confident with leadership theory. However, once the mentor is in the relationship and supporting their mentee, then their development really begins. They start to support their mentee in how to put some of the knowledge into practice. This learning then gets embedded in their own leadership repertoire as they work with their own teams.
A truly great mentor has obvious skills and qualities, such as good active listening, the ability to ask challenging questions and to be comfortable being challenged, and having the sense to give and receive valuable feedback.
These are all aspects a mentor can be developed in at the outset of a programme and that mentoring practice and supervision will enhance.
I would also expect an effective mentor to be emotionally intelligent and demonstrate the skills of self-awareness, empathy, motivation, self-regulation and social competence. In fact, these are also the key attributes required to be a robust role model, which many mentors in career and talent programmes are required to be.
There are also some more subtle skills that make a really superb mentor, but to me also make for a great leader and tend to be naturally nurtured and enhanced in the mentor as the mentoring relationship progresses.
These include the love of learning, developing others and being a more effective coach with their own team, which is often an outcome of being educated well as a mentor. The opportunity for reflection and being involved in a more disciplined reflective practice can make an enormous shift change to a mentor’s thinking discipline, which can translate into a far more strategic and less short-term view of their leadership behaviour.
Finally, a well-developed mentor will pick up a toolbox of techniques to use in mentoring which they can use just as much with their own teams as with their leadership roles. Mentoring process models, positive psychology ideas and other creative techniques will be valuable for the mentor to take into their day job and to really support the problem-solving and decision-making abilities of their own team and peers.
Impact on leadership performance
A piece of mentoring evaluation that really resonated when writing this article came from the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) programme for women in 2003. One of the biggest outcomes from this programme was the mentors’ realisation of how much being a mentor had impacted on their performance as leaders.
It made me aware early in my mentoring consultancy career how undersold some of the real benefits of mentoring can be.
Next issue: the confusing trend of how some mentoring programmes are adopting a more tangible coaching approach under the guise of mentoring