Mentoring Mistakes – I've made a few!

Having mentored young people for several years now, I thought I’d reflect on all the mistakes I’ve made along the way. It started more as an aide memoire but then I thought I’d share so that I could learn from other people’s mistakes too – please do pitch in with your thoughts and ideas. So, my friends if you can dim the lights and imagine Frank Sinatra singing “I'll say it clear; I'll state my case of which I'm certain” from ‘My Way’, then I’ll begin with my catalogue of mentoring mistakes.

1. Mentoring those who don’t want to be mentored.

It is important to mentor those who actually want to be “mentored” rather those who just want to network/befriend/find a date/consult a therapist. Young people specifically have a view that asking someone to mentor them will somehow help them land the Dream Job/University place of their choice/Music Recording Contract/New Business Venture or Get-out-of-jail free card (* delete as applicable). Mentoring those who want to be mentored is vital. Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? But attaining this clarity of purpose takes a great deal of maturity on the part of the mentee (the person being mentored is typically called a protégé or apprentice, but I prefer the term mentee).

I often ask a basic question at the very start of a relationship, which is “if you only ever get suggestions from me, will this be enough for you?” If they answer No, then it is a good sign that the mentee has defined the scope of their expectations. If they say Yes, this is a sign that a lot more conversation needs to take place before you proceed with the relationship.

A lot of young people already have unofficial mentors in their lives but may not recognise them for what they are. Given that media coverage has given rise to a generation wanting X-Factor judge Simon Cowell as their mentor (!), I advise some gentle probing about who they look-up to or talk to on a regular basis is always a good start.

And remember, learning to say ‘No’ to a mentoring request is also a mentoring skill.

2. Listening is the mentor’s greatest skill, practice it.

Being able to listen is to my mind the greatest skill that a mentor can have, particularly when advising young entrepreneurs who are unlikely to hear messages unless these correlate directly with their own thought processes. So to avoid “your pearls of wisdom falling on deaf ears” (with apologies for the mixed metaphor), it is more important to ‘ummh’ and ‘ahhh’ and ask open-ended questions to allow the mentee to talk round and round their subject matter until they, themselves, identify a possible path to follow. And it is equally important to allow mentees to reach their “eureka!” moment themselves even if you spotted it some hours earlier.

“The art of listening” for people like me, for whom the phrase “talking nineteen to a dozen” was invented, is difficult. The only solution is to practice “the art of listening” intently, as if your very life depended on it. I will often write down 3 words/phrases that I must hear from a mentoring session so I actively listen during a conversation.

3. Never leap from being a talker to being a doer!

This one is obvious, but a rule I’ve broken many times. As a mentor you should be able to leave a session with no actions to follow up. The moment you have to take some action, it means you’ve leapt over the line from being a guide and mentor to being part of the team. Yes, you can probably do the task better, faster and more cost effectively than your mentee, but that’s not the point. Remember the cardinal rule of leaving mentoring sessions with no actions.

4. Hang onto your Intellectual Property and sanity!

Just as you would advise your mentee to protect their intellectual property, for the sake of your sanity make sure you protect your IP. Things can go awry fairly quickly particularly if you have used your professional skills set to help your mentee prepare a project or business plan. They’ll want to share all your lovely infographics, charts, data and methodology with everyone. One cheeky individual even asked me for a copy of the software (in fact, several cheeky individuals asked me for the software) when the reality is that it is your knowledge and skills set combined with the software. [NB. Whenever anyone asks me about any software I use, it usually means that they want me to do their project or homework for them!].

Another issue is that if you mentor using presentations, retain the IP of these and distribute only hard copies unless you like your work being shared readily under other people’s name! Mentees rarely have a good grasp of copyright.

5. Set some boundaries

You do need to set boundaries to the mentor/mentee relationship. Mentees will always push for a more “let's be friends” type of arrangement, but as a mentor, you should seek to adopt one that better suits you. Mentoring is not the same as friendship and you will struggle to balance family relationships with mentoring if you do not set boundaries at the outset. So, for example, you should always agree to meet in neutral territory rather than at your home and ensure you always meet during the week rather than the weekend.

How much you network with your mentees is entirely up to you. As “opening doors” (networking) will be one of the aspects expected of you as the mentor, it is important to introduce your mentee formally and informally. So using online networking tools like LinkedIn may be fine. However, you may wish to keep your Facebook page for displaying holiday snaps, so ponder the levels of depth you want to the mentor/mentee relationship. Once you have defined what this is for you, stick to it.

6. Get organised and outline the parameters

You will need a brief profile of your mentee. You may get encyclopedic volumes about their entire life history since being an embryo, but a short “who, what, why, when, where” type of profile is much more valuable and you will need a single line introduction to your mentee, regardless. Ask the mentee to prepare this and perhaps you can help hone it a little. Also set your review dates. A quarterly update will help you judge progress of the relationship and whether your advice is helping or hindering! I prefer a formal paper-based review, but if you don’t like being so formal, make some notes in your diary about the meeting.

It “creeps out” young people when I am able to recall their achievements, activities or problems from the past month. However, given that modern technology allows you to Google someone, follow their twitter feed or keep-up with their BBM status; mentees need to understand that keeping you, the mentor, informed is a vital part of the relationship. Telepathy is not a skill that most mentors have or can develop.

7. Setting aside enough time

Mentees will always underestimate the amount of mentoring they need, usually by a factor of 5. So the best solution is to agree a schedule of mentoring, say a meeting once a month and than factor in five times as much in your personal calendar to allow for all the email, Facebook and SMS questions, not to mention the phone calls at midnight as they desperately try to complete some project, pitch or plan at the last minute!

A good mentoring relationship can spill over into life and you may also find yourself advising on everything from where to go on holiday to personal relationships!

8. Keep advice in reserve

The second most common mistake I make is over-loading the mentee with advice far too early. Whether this is in the form of presentations, a workshop or review of their work, this approach never works! So hold your best stuff in reserve and leave them wanting more from each mentoring session. Prepare them for what you want to tell them; then tell them when you are going to tell them; tell them and then remind them about what you’ve already told them! Obviously, use fewer repetitive words! This may sound like a crazy way of mentoring, but, it helps to contextualize your advice to their specific issues. This drip-feed method always works, because with a little luck you’ll also get the timing right with the right advice at the right time.

9. Mentoring is a two-way relationship

Over the years, I have written over a hundred personal references and update reports and yet, I can count the number of recommendations I’ve had in return on the fingers of one hand! A less thick-skinned person might consider this a sign of not being a good mentor, but, I prefer to rationalise this with a view that many mentees don’t like to admit that they’ve had some help along the way.

Ironically, on BBC TV show ‘Dragon’s Den’, many of the contestants are often desperate to sign up ‘dragons’ as mentors rather than investors. Contestants understand the commercial value of contacts, networks, approach and investor help they are likely to get. But when it comes to away from the TV cameras mentoring, the reality is the mentees often like to say “they did it their way”.

There is no easy solution to this. Asking for formal feedback only generates banality, so I guess the only answer is to bask in the success of the individual mentees as they make their way in life. If they are happy to report back after 10 years or more, this is a sign that you succeeded.

10. Agree an “end date” to the mentoring

It is also advisable to have an “end date” for mentoring an individual. This is best agreed when a particular plan or project is launched or delivered at which point you, as the mentor, can say how delighted you are with their progress and the fact “they can spread their wings and fly solo from now on” (with more eloquent or business like phrases as you see fit). You can agree to keep in touch once in a while, but, work hard to extricate yourself from more regular contact. Mentees find it hard to let go of their mentors!

Yes! Yes! Yes! To AV

Well OK. You only need to say one “yes” to the Alternative Vote, but the ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ does explain the simplicity of the system. You choose your favourite candidates for election and ignore the rest. If no individual achieves 50% of the ‘1^st’ place candidate votes, those with fewest votes are eliminated successively and their votes added to the more favoured ones until one of them reaches the 50% of the vote. Of course, you can rank them in order of preference which creates a little more work for the pollsters in dealing with the 2nds and 3rds, but, why the doomsters in the ‘No to AV’ campaign insist on explaining it in more technically complex terms is beyond me.

The ‘First Past The Post’ (FPTP) system, which is what we have now, is inherently unfair and archaic. Firstly because MPs need only get more votes than their competitors to be elected (in some seats 7 out of every 10 voters wanted other candidates, but their views are ignored). And secondly it has given rise to concepts like “safe seats” which really should be an anathema to a modern democracy. I want a plurality of voices; a diversity of representation, more choice and greater flexibility for candidates. It may give rise to more “coalition” style government and councils, but, since this helps to pull politics to the centre, eliminating extreme right-wing and left-wing views, that is no bad thing. Suddenly, independent candidates will have the same chance of being elected as those from the governing party or parties. It will depend on the quality of campaigning and the issues of greatest importance to the local electorate.

No doubt, even with the Alternative Vote system, “horse-trading” between candidates will continue and vested interests will undoubtedly try and tell us how to rank our No 1, 2, 3, candidates. However, think how much harder MPs will have to work for your vote? And until the ballot paper becomes a lottery ticket, I think most people will just nod along sagely and choose exactly whom they want on polling day, flummoxing pollsters, spin doctors and campaign managers alike.

Of course, the Alternative Vote (AV) system is a botch. It is not proportional representation which is the system I would have liked (in an ideal world), but, given that even a referendum on that is wholly unlikely if AV fails, I am prepared to accept a “lesser of two evils” choice. After all, FPTP is also a botch, probably devised at the same time as the Doomsday book (were serfs even allowed to vote then?) and it has not changed much since. Witness our white, male, upper class Cabinet – you could transport them back 200 years, change their clothes and they’d fit right in. Is this what 21^st Century Britain really needs?

Don’t waste your vote because you “don’t know"! 

Don’t waste your vote because you don’t know what to do. Choose ‘Yes to AV’.

If AV is approved, doomsters say that voters will not know how to vote in a general election - some seats will change from being Conservative to Liberal Democrat or vice versa. They further add that this is a bad thing. Really? AV is about more than the politicians we have at the moment. Changing the system is about the politicians we have in the future. You can reject AV on the basis that you don’t like Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and his U-Turn on student fees. But, this is totally irrelevant to the discussion about how we vote.

For the first time in my living memory we have a chance to say something about our political system. If I recall, this is the same system that has been trying to reform The House of Lords for decades now and that hasn’t exactly been going to plan either, has it? If we (the voting public) do not say something now, perhaps we should not have the chance to vote at all? Perhaps living ostrich-like in a country where a favoured few make all the important decisions about your life is OK with you. It isn’t with me.

In the future, MPs will have to try much harder to appeal to a broader base of voters – they will not have the luxury of ignoring minority votes (as they do at the moment). Every 2^nd ranking and 3^rd ranking vote is going to count.

So if you are from an ethnic minority group; young or old, gay, lesbian or trans-gender; female or male, or have a disability this is your chance to be heard. Vote ‘Yes to AV’.

Visit http://www.yestofairervotes.org for further information.