What Are The 4 Stages of Mentoring?

Have you heard of the 4 stages of mentoring? These four phases provide a framework that’s incredibly useful for structuring your mentoring sessions – especially when you’re working with the same mentee over a long-term period.

From your first virtual meeting to setting goals, making progress and celebrating achievements, the different stages of mentoring will take your mentee on a journey from feeling lost or stuck in a career rut to gaining clarity, new skills and smashing their goals – a mentoring metamorphosis, if you will.

As a mentor, you’ll be there every step of the way to lend a guiding hand and make sure the progress continues, whatever challenges your mentee encounters. Read on to discover more about the key stages of mentoring relationships.

The 4 Stages of Mentoring

The different mentoring stages are useful pillars to add structure to your mentor-mentee relationship. Keeping these stages in mind as your sessions continue will help you recognise progress and see when your focus needs to evolve. So, what are the four stages of mentoring?

1. Initiation

The getting-to-know-each-other stage

The first of the 4 stages of mentoring is initiation. This is where you and your mentee get to know each other to see if you’re a good fit for each other. At Career Navig8r, mentees can schedule a free 20-minute discovery call with mentors to make sure they’re comfortable before making the mentorship more formal.

While growth does happen when you step outside of your comfort zone, mentees need to be pretty comfortable to open up, share their professional desires and be a little bit vulnerable. Trust needs to be at the heart of every mentoring relationship for your mentee to blossom and thrive under your mentorship.

During the initiation stage, take the time to:

• Share your skills, qualification and experience – your mentee needs to get a feel for exactly how you’ll be able to help them, so give them a brief outline of your career and achievements
• Listen actively – when you’re chatting for the first time over a virtual call, you’ll need to make sure your body language is on point so you’re actively showing that you’re interested in the mentee. Look into the webcam to make eye contact with the other person, don’t cross your arms and make the effort to ask questions based on what they’ve been saying. All these little things go a long way when it comes to building trust
• Discover the mentee’s goals – you need to have a rough idea of the mentee’s goals so you can see whether you’ll be able to help them. At this stage, the goals don’t need to be SMART or fully fleshed out, they might just be ‘I want a promotion’ or ‘I want to change careers’. If you decide to work together, the finer details can be worked out together in the next stage of your mentoring relationship
• Be honest – if you’re excited to work with the mentee, let them know! At the same time, if you’re not sure you can help them with their goals, be honest and politely let them know that you’re not sure you’re the right fit for each other. You might even be able to recommend someone else from your network who’d be a better fit

2. Negotiation

The goal-setting stage

Negotiation is stage 2 in the 4 stages of the mentoring process. This is where the mentor and mentee ‘negotiate’ the terms of their relationship. For example: what will you be working towards together? What does the mentee expect from your partnership? How will you measure success?

So, how do you navigate this stage? Firstly, take the time to set boundaries together. Make it clear what you can and can’t help with, when you’re happy to be contacted, and whether anything you discuss will need to be kept confidential. This is a key part of the negotiation phase.

Then, you’re ready to start setting mentoring goals together. These need to be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound). Before you start, make sure your mentee is being clear and honest about their ultimate goal, whether it’s a promotion, a career change, building their network, improving their soft skills or something else. Then…

• Make it specific – help your mentee narrow their goal down. They won’t just want any career change, or any new contacts in their network. You need to know what kind of career path they have in mind or the why behind wanting to expand their network – who exactly do they want to connect with?
• Make it measurable – define what success will look like. How can you celebrate it otherwise?! Set some overall KPIs, as well as incremental targets. Keep coming back to these, and take the time to celebrate the little wins along the way 🥳
• Make sure it’s achievable – goals need to be realistic, but they can grow along the way. This is where the most negotiation is likely to take place in your mentoring relationship. You might feel that your mentee is being unrealistic or overly ambitious, but communicating that can be a tricky line to tread. Learn how to give feedback constructively as you negotiate achievable, realistic goals together
• Make it relevant – this one’s pretty self-explanatory! Is the goal relevant to the mentee’s journey? If not, encourage them to come up with something else that will benefit their career better. Now you know their desires, you should be able to suggest some helpful pointers to nudge them in the right direction
• Make it time-bound – set a deadline for when the goal will be achieved by. This will help to keep you both on track during your mentoring sessions. You might even want to set mini goals to achieve by specific dates along the way to break it down further to make the road ahead feel easier to travel

The next stages of mentoring will be all about working towards and eventually achieving and celebrating these goals, so you can’t move onto stage 3 until you’re done ‘negotiating’ these. It might take a couple of mentoring sessions to get these locked down, but then you’ll be ready for the magic to happen.

3. Growth

The making progress stage

The growth phase is arguably the most important of all 4 stages of mentoring. This is the stage that requires the most hard work, but it’ll be the most rewarding too.

The growth stage is all about working towards the SMART goals that were defined during ‘negotiation’, as the mentee makes small steps forwards to achieve their overall goal. As they put the work in and start to progress, they’ll grow in confidence and self-belief, which will be oh so rewarding for you to watch. Even if you’re focusing on ‘hard’ or technical, industry-specific skills together, their soft skills like independent thinking, problem solving and communication will naturally improve along the way too.

Growth can take many different forms as it’ll be unique to each individual mentee; but one thing’s for certain – every growth stage is wonderful to witness.

4. Closure

The reflection and celebration stage

The last of the 4 stages of mentoring is closure. This is the stage where your mentoring journey together comes to an end, as the goals you’d been working towards in the growth phase will have been achieved.

You might decide between you that you’d like to work on something else together and revisit the negotiation and growth stages once again, or you might part ways having formed a great new relationship with a valuable professional contact.

When any mentor-mentee relationship comes to an end, take the time to reflect on your achievements together. Mark the occasion with a little celebration, whether you send your mentee a card and small gift or toast their success during your final mentoring session.

How Do You Know When You’ve Completed the Different Stages of Mentoring?

Every mentoring partnership will experience the 4 stages of mentoring slightly differently, but you’ll know when you’re ready to move onto each new phase.

Once you feel comfortable working together and have set expectations, you’ll be all set to progress from initiation to negotiation. And when you’ve negotiated some SMART goals together, it’ll be time to start experiencing growth. Keep referring back to what makes your mentee’s goals SMART to see when they’ve been achieved – it won’t always be as straightforward as ‘when they get promoted’ or ‘when they start a new job’.

The closure stage completes the 4 stages of mentoring, and you’ll know when you’ve got there – you’ll be able to feel it. You and your mentee should feel fulfilled, like you’ve achieved something together and you should be proud of your journey. Take the time to celebrate and reflect on how far you’ve come together. You’ll both have learnt so much along the way. You might even want to take your learnings into a new mentoring relationship with another mentee, beginning the different stages of mentoring all over again.

Can You Skip One of the 4 Stages of Mentoring?

While initiation will always come first and closure will naturally come towards the end of a mentoring journey, it’s okay to think of negotiation and growth as the more fluid stages of mentoring.

As your mentee starts to grow and make progress towards their goals, they may discover new areas they’d like to explore, taking your relationship back to the negotiation stage. This means you’ll need to draw up new SMART goals, which might feed into their original goals or be something completely different that they want to pursue.

There may be some back and forth between these two stages of mentoring until goals have been met and the mentee is ready to move into the closure stage. Take as long you need – slow and steady wins the race and all that. Remember: the road to success is rarely straight.

Start Your Mentoring Journey with Career Navig8r

Once you’ve got your head around the 4 stages of mentoring and are ready to start your journey, it’s easy to sign up to become a Career Navig8r (that’s what we call our mentors, because that’s what they are – people who help others navigate their career path).

Become a Career Navig8r to:

• Pass on what you’ve learnt in your career to the next generation
• Give something back to your industry
• Top up your income
• Make money working from home
• Build your network of contacts
• Feel the glow of the warm fuzzies that comes with helping and inspiring others

Start mentoring and experience the magic for yourself.