In our section on the Evolution of the Mentoring Relationship, we examined the phases of the mentoring relationship and listed the competencies to successfully . Mentoring, one form of relationship-building, is an opportunity for nurturing potential moving around and up in the organization, feedback on skills/ knowledge. possess the skills, attitudes, and activity ideas needed to effectively men- tor a young Mentors was based on Building Relationships with Youth in Program.
The benefit of learning this information is to help you decide if you have the qualities, skills and commitment to assume a part in a mentoring partnership.
It is important to understand the roles and responsibilities involved in mentoring to be able to make an educated decision concerning your level of participation.
There are four actual instructional sections in this training: Mentoring Orientation, is devoted to an overview of the process of mentoring and its critical components. Mentor Training, identifies the responsibilities, qualities and skills required of a mentor and provides guidance on how to acquire them.
Mentee Training, covers the same requisites as for the mentor but from the needs of the mentee. It also covers the critical elements of creating a vision statement, goal setting and an establishing an action plan that ensures a maximization of the mentoring benefits.
Mentoring Relationship Evaluation, focuses on learning and using process and outcome evaluation techniques. Training Path You have a choice of participating in the entire training, both mentor and mentee, no matter which role you have selected.
The site is set up with options to take the overview and then go directly to the material designed for only your role and then back to the common ground of evaluation. If you choose to take the entire training, please complete the assessment instrument from the viewpoint of only the role you will assume in the partnership.
After successfully completing this section, you will be able to: Contrast coaching and mentoring on their different factors. Identify key effective and ineffective characteristics of a successful mentor. Identify key effective and ineffective characteristics of a successful mentee.
List the benefits of mentoring for the mentors, mentees and the supporting organization State why mentoring is a learning relationship rooted in the principles of adult learning. Define the four stages of a mentoring relationship. List the main responsibilities of a mentor.
Identify qualities of a successful mentor. Describe the two mentor competencies needed to build rapport. Illustrate the different types of effective questions.
Develop a Mentoring Partnership Agreement. This means expressing your feelings effectively and appropriately, and setting boundaries where necessary. This is simply understanding how the other person feels without being judgmental.
Don't confuse empathy with sympathy, which means feeling sorry for or feeling pity for someone who's in a worse situation than you are. Recognize and accept your own limitations.
It's important to identify your feelings and their source, and accept responsibility for your feelings and actions. This involves demonstrating your feelings and views to another and being open to her reactions.
This means taking risks, making yourself vulnerable, and accepting the fact that sometimes your trust may be abused. The pay-off, however is better communication for everybody.
Active listening As mentioned above, active listening is key to effective communication. Whenever two people communicate, there are three components to whatever communication occurs: They may show up at the wrong time, or the wrong place, or not at all.
Building Effective Mentoring Relationships
Even if the two of you were in the same room when you made arrangements to meet, the message was not received. This is where active listening comes in. An active or attentive listener: Hears what the person says Identifies and labels the feelings a speaker experiences Listens for undercurrent feelings not explicitly expressed by the speaker. This can include the kind of family a person grew up in, what's important to the person, what the person's view of the world is, how this person treats other people, how this person treats their self.
The components of active listening: The process of active listening also includes response, body language, and empathy. Let's discuss these in detail: In order to demonstrate interest and gain understanding, it's important for a listener to respond to a speaker verbally and non-verbally. Some verbal response techniques include: Restatements of the speaker's feeling or meaning in your own words.
Paraphrases help you guard against miscommunication and allow the speaker to clarify her own feelings. Statements that focus on the emotions or feelings you observe in the speaker.
Feeling reflections show the speaker that you are listening and validating her emotions. Questions or comments you make to elicit more information from the speaker and to double-check your and the speaker's understanding of the problem.
Brief verbal responses that show the speaker that you are following the conversation. Organizing statements that capture the speaker's emotions and concerns concisely.
A summary helps integrate the information you've heard, leads to new directions in conversation, and helps wrap up a listening session. Another component of active listening and effective responding is non-verbal; the posture you have during a conversation clues the speaker in to how interested you are in the conversation.
Look the person in the eye - Good eye contact shows you that are paying attention and take the conversation seriously. Watching the speaker also lets you read the speaker's body language, which may say a lot about how they feel.
However, in some cultures, steady eye contact is not considered polite. Be sensitive to these cultural differences. Use natural posture - Sit up in your chair with your legs crossed or together or stand up with your feet about a shoulder's width apart in a relaxed stance. If you slouch, rest your head on your hands, shift positions a lot, or cross your arms on your chest, you signal boredom, fatigue or restlessness.
Sit in a helping position - If you sit across from a person with a table in between, you may put yourself in an "oppositional" stance. Sit at an angle and lean slightly towards but don't crowd out!
As we mentioned earlier in the section, empathy means understanding how the other person feels without being judgmental. Empathy is often confused with sympathy, which means feeling sorry for or feeling pity for someone who's in a worse situation than you are. The rationale of good listening is to encourage communication and understanding, and to pave the way for future sharing. Some common pitfalls include the following: But think how frustrated you would be if you wanted a good listener and ended up with an inconsiderate talker!
To practice your active listening skills, see the Tools section for an exercise on active listening. The steps to effective problem solving are as follows: Using open-ended questions, you uncover important facts, feeling sources, personal limitations and preferences. It's important that you respect and support the decision she reaches, even if you don't entirely agree with it Taking action: This step entails the youth and mentor making observable efforts to bring about the solution best tailored to the speaker's needs.
It would be easy to ignore this last step, but then the problem solving process wouldn't be the problem solving process! Pay close attention and devote enough time to enhance your communication and problem -solving skills.
They will be very important to your mentoring relationship.