As a mentee and mentor begin their partnership, one of the first, and most important, topics of discussion should involve setting specific goals to be accomplished throughout the course of the mentoring program. Without objectives to shoot for, the pair may find it difficult to recognize the significant progress being made.
But how can you best prepare mentees who are entering your company’s corporate mentoring program? At Menttium, we kick off the mentoring partnership with a Pre-Mentoring Assessment, which provides mentees with a baseline of their current ability levels according to their own perceptions as well as those of their managers. This report allows mentees to evaluate their existing capabilities and determine which areas to focus on when it comes to setting development goals. Here are some general goals that can also help to guide incoming mentees.
Build Confidence
Arguably one of the most common goals that mentees set is to build confidence. This long-term goal is something that mentorship programs already aim to achieve, but keeping it in mind can make for a particularly productive partnership. We’ve found that our mentees typically like to focus on areas such as executive presence, authentic self-promotion, personal brand, navigating complex, matrix organizations, leading globally, and navigating change.
These two attributes go hand-in-hand and are important for developing key talent into effective leaders. Confidence helps mentees navigate their way through meaningful conversations, challenges, and successes in the workplace. And with the right leadership skills, a mentee can truly make strides in his or her career. With the help of a mentor, the mentee can dive deeper into these goals and discuss ways to develop these skills by setting smaller, short-term goals.
Explore Topics of Interest
Mentees typically bring discussion topics to the partnership with the express intent of learning from a mentor’s unique experiences. This can be a great short-term goal to set and accomplish in regular mentoring conversations, especially since it can support other goals such as building confidence and leadership skills or positioning yourself for more opportunities in the workplace.
Put yourself in the mentor’s shoes and think about what you might like to ask an experienced executive. You’ll find that the potential topics of discussion are endless. One suggestion might be discussing specific challenges in the workplace and how to overcome them or how to pursue respect rather than likeability as an emerging leader in your company. There is no topic too small for a mentee to discuss with his or her mentor, and each conversation focuses the partnership further, building upon the last meeting and generating authentic, vulnerable dialogues that ultimately set the mentee up for future career success. Sometimes, the power of mentoring can be in seeing the world through a different lens. Leverage the point of difference to learn from someone with unique experiences and perspectives very unlike your own.
Learn from Menttium’s Business Education Webinars
Our business education webinars are monthly online seminars that focus on topics relevant to emerging leaders and high performing business professionals. These sessions feature mentors that provide valuable insight and personal stories on a range of subjects. Every month focuses on a new topic that is geared toward educating employees and helping them synthesize the information to bolster their own success in their professional careers.
These webinars are a great way for mentees to dive into a topic of interest and expand their knowledge. By learning from a mentor’s experiences, it becomes more personal. From these webinars, you can go into further and deeper discussions with your own mentor. Learning from each month’s topic is a valuable way mentees can support their larger, long-term goals.
Prepare for Expanded Opportunities
Another long-term goal that mentees should be setting is to position themselves for expanded opportunity within their company. This might seem like an intimidating goal, but with the help of a mentor, the mentee should be able to feel confident and positive about achieving his or her career aspirations by focusing on goals like managing up, navigating a matrix organization, and influencing with and without authority. Our Return on Mentoring report shows that 91% of program participants felt that the program positively impacted their readiness for career progression, preparing them to take on roles with greater complexity, authority, and scope.
The goal of a mentorship program is to help develop key talent through career development, education and learning, and boosting engagement. With the help of these major learning opportunities, mentees should come out of a program with the confidence that they now have the tools, knowledge, and resources to continue to grow in their roles within their company.
Build a Strong Relationship with an Experienced Mentor
Strong relationships are extremely important to career development, and they are one of the most critical parts of a mentoring program. The mentor-mentee relationship is what helps the mentee thrive and achieve each goal. This relationship provides the ideal climate for diverse and vulnerable conversations, enabling the mentee to grow both professionally and personally.
Through the mentor-mentee partnership, mentees gain unique perspectives and numerous insights that can put them in a position to achieve their goals. By sharing experiences, working towards each goal, and allowing for conversations that will foster creative and innovative thinking, the mentor and mentee will form a mutually beneficial partnership.
Mentoring Programs from Menttium
Mentoring programs are one of the best ways to position your key talent to excel, but setting goals is only one part of the equation. Armed with 28 years of success, Menttium can provide you with the foundation and support you need in order to ensure your mentees achieve their goals. From our cross-company mentoring programs to customized internal programs, we’ll help you aid your employees as they develop throughout their careers.
The key to our success? Keeping the mentor-mentee relationship at the forefront of everything we do. We design every program to provide the tools, resources, and knowledge to generate open-minded, authentic conversations. And we never base our matches on a computer algorithm, but rather through a thoughtful interview process that keeps the mentee, as well as the mentor’s, goals in mind.
By designing and facilitating a customized mentoring program at your business, we can assist you in increasing retention and job satisfaction. Your high-potential employees will work to become leaders and changemakers within your company with the help of a mentor and our unique approach to the mentoring process. Contact us today to learn more about what Menttium has to offer.