Leadership & Mentorship

Mentoring tips: how mentor and mentee can make the most of it | Culture professionals network

[ad_1]

As a professional development tool, mentoring is an effective means of moving people on and supporting them in their career aspirations. Over the past few years we’ve seen the launch of a number of high profile schemes that promote and offer mentoring services: some act as a broker between potential mentors and aspiring entrepreneurs, such as the Mentorsme scheme; others offer resources, for example Nesta’s peer programme.

Mentoring, however, is not a magic wand; it’s not a simple steps-to-success programme. The process needs careful management to ensure everyone involved gets the most out of the opportunity. Here are five tips for doing just that.

Choosing the right person

We are often drawn to people who we most admire or would like to emulate and this can often shape our choice of mentor. If you’re an artist you might be thinking Damien Hirst would be the ideal mentor; if you’re film-maker, you might consider approaching someone like Debbie Isitt. But these are not necessarily the best people to explain how they made it. Being able to reflect on your success is something most people can do easily, but recognising and then explaining the relevant factors behind it is a real skill that not everyone can do well.

I often hear leading creatives explain away their success as a chance meting with an influential person: a lucky break. It makes for a good story but it’s not encouraging to hear that so much hangs on chance. Good mentors will concentrate on the details that led to that lucky break, like the many years they spent building networks and nurturing relationships.

Get into your mentor’s networks

In the arts, the role of the mentor is to dispense advice and guidance drawn form years of experience at the coal face of the creative industries. However, what you as a mentee should also aim to do is engineer access to their considerable networks and contacts – most importantly, with their blessing.

Creative Enterprise recently matched a scriptwriter with an ex BBC producer, who was able to give fast-track access to the script editor of a well known TV medical drama. But a word of warning: don’t start by explaining that you only want your mentor for his or her address book – consider it a bonus and only after your mentor feels that you are credible enough to be allowed near their hard-earned contacts.

Be open and flexible

It’s good to go into mentoring with a clear idea of what you want. That said, you should also be prepared to change direction and explore new waters. Your mentor is there to challenge you, to get you to really think through why you want to do something, and whether the course of action you’re taking is the best way to do it. In doing all of this, a good mentor must understand tough love.

Avoid therapy

Mentoring is a relationship with someone prepared to listen to you talk about your hopes and aspirations, but also your concerns and fears. Sounds a bit like therapy. As such, the mentoring relationship can become an opportunity to visit personal challenges on which the mentor might not be qualified to comment.

Make sure the relationship focuses on professional challenges and explore options for overcoming them. Also ensure the meeting ends with clear and positive actions. Importantly, as a mentee, make sure you do your homework, otherwise when you meet again you’ll end up going over the same ground.

Mentors: shut up and listen

So you’ve been asked to be a mentor. Your mentee is going to want to hear you talk about yourself a lot, right? Wrong. Your mentee wants you to understand their needs, recognise where they are in their journey, and help them make decisions about how to reach their goals.

Yes, bringing in personal anecdotes and experiences to illustrate a point is important, but spending time explaining how you did it with the expectation that your mentee will do the same encourages dependency. It might even squeeze the mentee along a route that isn’t right for them. Listening is the watchword here; encouraging independence and recognising the uniqueness of their personal journey is really important for a successful mentoring relationship.

When mentoring works, it can changes lives and careers. Done badly, it can be demoralising at best and harmful at worst. My final tip is be honest with each other; if it isn’t working, call it a day.

Peter McLuskie is a project manager at the Institute of Creative Enterprise – follow him on Twitter @petermcluskie

This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. To get more articles like this direct to your inbox, sign up free to become a member of the Culture Professionals Network.



[ad_2]

Read More

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Back to top button