Mentoring notes
From PLN
Mentoring notes
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Shorter essays on mentoring from a variety of sources.
Minding mentoring
- by Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest March 2008
Offering managers, especially new managers, “a lifeline of support in the form of mentoring” isn’t as easy as you might think. Here are some tips for would-be mentors:
- Prepare adequately. Be sure to offer well-thought-out advice. Don’t plan to just have coffee and shoot the breeze. Both mentor and “mentee” should should understand the purpose of each session.
- Share stories of failure. Tell them “how you overcame adversity through creativity … and include the bombs.” Young managers “need to learn how to be creative, even if that means risking failure.”
- Go offsite. Being out of the office may be just what you need for a “powerful exchange.”
- Don’t offer mentoring just to rising stars. “Reach out … to those you’re not close enough with.”
([http://www.elabs2.com/functions/message_view.html?mid=56401&mlid=73&siteid=15988&uid=e1fbbe24d3 "Minding mentoring," The Inside Training Newsletter, Feb. 27, 2008.)
360 mentoring
- by Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest March 2008
Formal mentoring programs don’t always work, and in today’s flatter organizations your best bet for successful mentoring may be a small network of five to six people, including peers and even subordinates, “who take an active interest in your professional development.”
According to Kathy Kram, coeditor of The Handbook of Mentoring at Work (Sage, 2007), here’s how to build a successful mentoring network:
- Define goals and expectations. What kind of expertise do you want to build? Technical, strategic, cultural? Limit your list to five or six objectives. Then recruit the people you want to mentor you.
- Make every mentoring relationship reciprocal. The old model was one-way; the new model is reciprocal. “Both members of a mentoring relationship have teachable knowledge.”
- Regularly evaluate progress. Initially, chemistry’s important, as are similar backgrounds. But another essential ingredient is “a shared commitment to the mentoring relationship.” Every quarter, you and your mentor need to ask each other if this is working, if you need to adjust what you’re doing, or just move on.
When the mentoring ends (whatever the reason), don’t just stop scheduling appointments. “Serving as a mentor is ‘an act of citizenship’. … Protégés need to reciprocate in kind by thanking their mentors for their time, energy, and assistance, and helping them ‘transition to the next phase of the relationship’.”
(Elizabeth Collins, “360 mentoring,” Harvard Management Update, March 2008.)
Building success one relationship at a time
- by Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest March 2008
“Your network is your net worth.” (Tim Sanders) Library leaders are great networkers, but there’s always more to learn, especially by talented newer staff on the leadership path.
Keith Ferrazzi, co-author of Never Eat Alone And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time and a master networker in his own right, believes the secret to success is in reaching out to other people. Highly successful people are distinguished from everyone else by “the way they use the power of relationships–so that everyone wins.”
Genuine relationship–building is sharing ”knowledge, resources, time, and energy with people [you] know and trust.” Here are a few of Ferrazi’s proven strategies for building genuine relationships:
- Look for mentors. Connect with people who can help guide you and introduce you to others you need to know. Be a mentor yourself.
- Be interesting. “Develop the style, knowledge, and expertise that will draw others to you.”
- Build it before you need it. Create lists of people you know and want to know and stay in touch with them.
- “Ping” constantly. Reach out to people ”in your circle of contacts all the time–-not just when you need something.”
- Don’t keep score. Instead of just getting what you want, you need to make sure “that the people who are important to you get what they want, too.”
- Never eat alone. Avoid “invisibility”-– it’s a fate worse than failure. Constantly reach out to colleagues and future contacts.
(Amazon.com description of Never Eat Alone. Harvard Business is featuring Ferrazzi in an online seminar on relationship building for $349.00.)
Related articles and resources
- We got trouble... - an overview for articles on internal difficulties.
- Mentoring - Peer Panel - the LLN Peer Panel discusses mentoring.
- Forget the OPAC, why does library management suck? - George Needham discusses management issues and mentoring as one solution.
- Mentoring resources includes links to a wide range of mentoring programs and new member round tables, with direct links to mentoring success stories.
