4 Tips to Ensure Successful Mentorship Meetings

Mentorship meetings will likely form the bulk of the time you spend working with your Mentee/Mentor. That’s why we feel it’s so important that you have the tools to make the most of these meetings.

Today we’ll be exploring our top four tips for a truly successful Mentorship meeting and how you can apply them for yourself.

1. Establish Clear Objectives and Agenda in Advance

There are times in life when you can get away with a ‘just wing it’ philosophy, but your career probably shouldn’t be one of them and neither should mentorship meetings. After all, these meetings can be the defining moments in a Mentees career where they come to meaningful realisations and learn valuable professional lessons.

While your exact approach to mentorship meetings will of course vary, having a defined approach – and preferably an agenda – will go a very long way towards ensuring that your meetings are always on task and goal-focused.

2. Ensure Active Listening

A mentorship meeting can be a really exciting environment, especially when real progress is being made. That said, things can easily get complicated quickly and it’s a lot harder to keep up when you’re not actively listening to the other person.

It might sound obvious, but instead of trying to think about what you’ll say next, simply stop and process what’s being said. Allow pauses to develop naturally in the conversation as you each consider where to take things. Most importantly, avoid the urge to race past every topic.

There’s a real joy in finding pragmatic solutions to your problems and there are times when it can be tempting to try and squeeze as much as possible into one conversation. Just remember that it’s okay to slow down and that your best ideas will usually come once you’ve sat with them a little while.

3. Foster an Environment of Trust and Openness

It’s almost impossible to take constructive criticism from someone you don’t trust and it can be equally challenging to offer the best advice when you worry it may simply be thrown back in your face. Put simply, trust has to go both ways and the only way to build a relationship like that is by extending trust to the other person.

That’s why we encourage that people always spend their first meetings really getting to know one another both in a professional and a personal sense. Try to find out why the other person is here and what motivates them towards their goals.

Much as we like to believe there’s a barrier between the professional and the personal worlds, the truth is that the two intersect all the time. People come to their careers because of who they are – their skills, their interests, or their needs. Understanding what drives them as a person will help you to communicate more effectively and work together as a partnership with a shared aim of helping the Mentee to achieve their dream career.

4. Encourage Constructive Feedback and Reflection

The biggest progress always comes as a result of meaningfully acting on feedback which is often easier said than done. If you really want to make the most out of feedback then you have to allow time for reflection – as a matter of fact, you should encourage it.

While your meetings probably ought to have an agenda, that doesn’t mean every week should have the same agenda or that the agenda in question can’t be a simple one. If you need to devote a whole week’s meeting to processing one piece of feedback then there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, it may well be the perfect thing to do if it means that the feedback will be acted upon.

When you get right down to it, mentoring meetings aren’t about fast-tracking the Mentor but about helping them to grow.

Think of a career like a house. You might be able to build a whole house in a day, if you don’t mind the shoddy foundations and two days later it’ll have fallen down again. On the other hand you can spend a year hard at work, making sure that every brick you lay is in the perfect place. If you do that then not only will you have built the perfect house but you’ll be able to do it again and again and again.

Want to earn money while inspiring someone to follow in your footsteps? By becoming a Mentor you could not only pass on your professional skills, but you could also start a second career. As if that wasn’t great enough, you can be a Mentor whilst also being a Mentee, allowing you to earn and learn at the same time, growing your skills and building a career you’ll be proud of.

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