How to Be The Best Mentor Ever

Knowing how to be a good mentor is essential to make sure your mentoring partnership benefits both you and your mentee. However, before you can properly get to grips with understanding how to be the best mentor ever, it’s important to know the difference between the three often (understandably) confused practices: coaching, training and mentoring.

• Coaching: A coach doesn’t necessarily need to have in-depth knowledge of the job role they’re coaching. They’re more concerned with understanding the goals and performance of the person they are coaching, and helping them to achieve their wider goals. They can see above and beyond the role
• Training: A trainer has to be a subject matter expert, usually in one specific aspect of a job, and is focused on imparting that knowledge. And only that knowledge, to the trainee. They often focus on one aspect of a person’s role
• Mentoring: A mentor needs to have in-depth knowledge of the job role they are mentoring in. They offer guidance and support and share their experience of the job the mentee has, or wants. A good mentor is not too bogged down by a specific aspect and not overly concerned with things outside of the role

Coaching and mentoring are the ones that people most often get confused – ironic, as the first step to knowing how to be an effective mentor is understanding that you are not a coach. Sure, there are core skills that apply to both, particularly soft skills around building trust and healthy relationships, but there are also some significant differences between coaching and mentoring.

Allow us to go offside for a moment with a quick football analogy that will give you an idea of what makes a good mentor rather than a coach or trainer.

Do you want your favourite team’s goalkeeper to learn from a former goalkeeper or a striker turned manager?

The goalkeeper is a mentor, they’ve done the job and know how to excel at it.

The former striker-turned-manager can see the overall view of the team – but doesn’t really know how to be a goalkeeper.

Knowing how to be a good mentor is all about passing (football pun most definitely intended) on your knowledge and experience to someone who wants to get where you are.

What Makes a Good Mentor?

The best mentors cut the middle ground between coaching, training and mentoring. What makes a good mentor is someone who has the ability to combine the skills of coaches and trainers, using their prior knowledge, expertise and experience to guide a mentee along the path to success. They can do this because they’ve already been there, done that.

Did you know? The word ‘mentor’ comes from Homer’s Odyssey? Yes, really! Mentor acted as a friend and advisor to the legendary Greek King Odysseus. Although you probably won’t be mentoring a literal king (but never say never!), this shows you just how important knowing how to be a good mentor can be. Would Odysseus have been as renowned for his intellectual brilliance, guile and versatility without Mentor by his side?

Here are 7 traits that all good mentors have:

1. Knowledge and Experience

To be a good mentor, you need specific knowledge, insights and experience to share with your mentee – as well as a willingness and desire to use them to guide someone else on their career path. Your knowledge and experience will be the foundation of your mentor-mentee relationship. The key to knowing how to be an effective mentor is not just having the experience, but also the ability to advise and guide your mentee.

2. Approachability

Availability and approachability are both key when it comes to how to be an effective mentor. Knowing how often and when in a month you and your mentee meet is important and you may find it beneficial to create a contact schedule.

Establish some boundaries so your mentee knows when, where and how they should contact you. You might want to book recurring meetings weekly or monthly, as this will give the mentee enough time to complete tasks and make progress between your sessions.

3. Good Interpersonal Skills

Fantastic relationship building and interpersonal skills are essential for being a good mentor. These include listening (especially active listening), emotional intelligence and problem solving.

Listen for what’s not being said. Sometimes even your mentee won’t be sure what it is they need. Actively listen to what they’re saying to you and try to identify what the key issue is, then work on addressing that.

Trust is also crucial. You’re guiding someone’s career. You wouldn’t trust your future to someone you didn’t trust, so your mentee won’t either. Be interested, respectful and consistent in your mentoring sessions to build a trusting foundation.

4. Desire to Commit

A mentoring relationship is often a long-term commitment, so you need to be prepared for that. Unlike training (usually) and coaching (sometimes), mentoring is rarely a ‘one and done’ situation. You need to be equally, if not more, committed than your mentee, with a real and genuine desire to help. Some people enter mentoring just for the additional benefits to themselves, but those who truly know how to be a good mentor understand the importance of a mutually beneficial mentor-mentee relationship.

5. Organisation

Organisation is another of the key traits behind how to be a good mentor. Have a new planner (it could be a notepad and pen or a digital app) for each mentee you work with and fill it with your appointments, key points you’ve covered, goals, milestones, and other important dates.

Keep track of everything in one place, so you never miss something important to you or your mentee.

Plan out your sessions, take notes throughout and write down follow-up points at the end of every session. Let your mentee see you doing this as it is a skill they can learn from to help keep themselves more organised.

6. SMART Goal Setting

Goals are at the centre of every good mentor-mentee partnership. It’s imperative that you work out goals with your mentee, and that you keep them focused on those, while helping them along the way. Make sure these goals are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound).

7. Positivity

A positive attitude is one of the keys to how to be a successful mentor. Every meeting with your mentee should be positive. As a mentor, you need to be motivating and encouraging in every session. Once you’ve worked together to determine your mentee’s goals, it’s your job to keep nudging them along that path. To be their guiding light.

That doesn’t mean you don’t have to provide honest and constructive feedback though. Don’t allow positivity to overtake realism with your mentee.

Show confidence in your mentee to help them overcome any feelings of imposter syndrome. You can do this by:

• Speaking positively
• Encouraging them to try something a little harder because you know they are that good
• Repeat back to them things they said that you liked or things they’ve done that have shown improvement
• Compliment them when they do something well
• Give them practical tips on feeling more confident: stand taller, dress for the part, keep their chin up
• Let them make final decisions on things to help boost their confidence
• Celebrate every win with them, even the small ones

If you have the skills and characteristics listed above, you’re already well on your way to being a good mentor.

The Benefits Of Understanding How to Be a Good Mentor

Mentoring, when done properly, benefits both the mentor and the mentee. This is why it’s so important to take the time to understand how to be the best mentor. In fact, a study by Gartner of over 1,000 people at California-based Sun Microsystems found that employees who received mentoring were promoted FIVE times more often than people who didn’t have mentors.

What’s more, people who became mentors were SIX times more likely to be promoted to a bigger job. This goes to show that learning how to be a good mentor can have a big pay off – not only will you be giving something back to your sector, but you could also further your own career. Back of the net.

Other benefits of mentoring for mentors include:

• Improve your communication skills
• Further your career prospects
• Top up your income – monetise your knowledge
• A chance to learn from someone else – especially if you try peer mentoring or reverse mentoring, but you will learn from any mentoring relationship
• A warm fuzzy glow (the best benefit of all)

How to Become a Mentor

At Career Navig8r, we call our mentors Navig8rs because they help navigate mentees through the various obstacles and roadblocks they’re likely to find in their particular industry.

We’re specifically looking to match mentees with Navig8rs who have done the same job role.
If you wanted to be a world-class goalkeeper, you’re more likely to want to be mentored by Gordon Banks than Geoff Hurst.

While both were extremely talented footballers, and both would know a thing or two about performance and playing in World Cup finals, only one of them was a world-class goalkeeper and knows the challenges of that specific role.

We are only looking for former IT architects to mentor IT architects. So if you’ve been successful in telecoms, IT departments or HR, why not use your hard-earned knowledge and experience to help someone else in your industry?. We want strikers to mentor strikers. Goalkeepers to mentor goalkeepers. Simple.

Now that you know how to be a good mentor, all you need to do is register on our platform, fill out your profile, set your hourly rate and wait for mentees to find you. Read more about how it works to get started.

If you think you have the skills, passion and desire, sign up to become a mentor today.