Four Tips to Get Started as a Remote Mentor
Be proactive.
Being effective as a remote mentor requires you to be proactive. This is particularly important if you have established a mentor-mentee relationship based on in-person meetings and are now forced, because of travel or the COVID-19 pandemic, to work with your mentees remotely.
Keep this in mind: your mentees need to hear from you. In a situation when every aspect of life appears to be filled with uncertainty, they need you to provide the building blocks for successful remote mentorship. Here I will share four ways to help you engage with your mentee remotely.
1. Set intentions together
Intentions are powerful. They help you focus, identify what’s important, and manage your time effectively. When done routinely, intentions can help be more productive as you work towards your goals. They also serve an integral role in providing structure amidst chaos. A great way to stay in touch with your mentees is to set up a couple of minutes each week or month to help them prioritize and set their intentions for a given time period.
2. Have a leadership discussion series
Take this moment to build the leadership skills and business acumen of your mentees by discussing key leadership topics that can prepare them to be more efficient and assertive at work. Publications like the Harvard Business Review and McKinsey Quarterly have a superb collection of short articles offering research and experience-based advice on topics related to leadership and business. Publications in Medium cover excellent leadership topics as well.
Here are some of my favorite leadership articles I had previously discussed with one of my mentors:
Managing up: What it means and why it’s important
6 Ways to Lead When You Are Not in Charge
The Three Strengths of a True Strategic Leader
How Perfectionists Can Get Out of Their Own Way
The “It” Factor: How to Have Executive Presence in a Meeting
Bias Busters: Premortems: Being Smart at the Start
3. Start a book club
Books can be great mentors themselves. If you find an interesting title, share it with your mentee! By doing so, as a remote mentor, you open a new dynamic in your mentoring relationship where learning is enhanced by sharing your impressions and listening to your mentee’s.
A small book club is also an activity where time commitment is relatively low. Depending on your preference, you can choose between having periodic discussions (e.g. monthly) or more informal ongoing commenting (e.g. via a group message or Slack). Discussions can be as simple as each person sharing their overall impressions and any valuable lesson they’ve derived from reading.
Here a few book recommendations to get you started:
Originals: How non-conformist move the world (Adam Grant)
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (Cal Newport)
Ignorance: How it Drives Science (Stuart Firestein)
So You Want to Talk About Race? (Ijeoma Oluo)
The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumphs (Ryan Holiday)
4. Challenge your mentees
As a remote mentor, your mentee won’t have access to the in-person coaching element for guided skill development. This, however, is an opportunity to challenge your mentee to engage in self-assessment and independent skill development.
Your role as a mentor is not lost. Even during independent study, you can provide two valuable aspects: structure and accountability.
Initially, guide them through the development of an Individual Development Plan (IDP) for them to establish their career goals and skills that need to be developed. For technical workers and scientists, myIDP is a good place to start. If working with business and management professionals, follow this career planning worksheet from Northeastern University.
Specifically, for skills assessment, I’ve found useful this adaptation of myIDP from the USC Neuroscience Graduate Program IDP form (page 4).
In this core competencies evaluation table, my own assessment looked something like this back in 2018:
Using the structure provided by the self-assessment exercise as a starting point, ask your mentee to come up with three or four strategies on how to develop a particular skill. To stay in touch while your mentees navigate this process, have periodic check-ins where you ask them about their progress and difficulties. While they can go through this process on their own, your feedback and advice can be instrumental in ensuring their success.
