Mentors-talk: How to approach your 1st mentoring session? ( focus on what’s matter)

If I have to choose one “mentoring” advice to give you, it will be a very actionable one:

If you want to be a good mentor, you have to start mentoring! Now.

Don’t delay setting the first session. Getting into a committed pace is very important to ensure you are both serious about the process and relationship. Don’t let the opportunity slip away and feel like an unwelcome burden, giving you a hard time balancing your life instead of nurturing it.

As in any other project, your first session creates the setup for the whole interaction.

The most important part is for both of you to get to know each other. Make sure the first session has the right casual but appropriate atmosphere and spend a reasonable amount of time on introducing yourselves.

Don’t make it only professional. Share a little of your personal life, your habits, and goals.

All of the above ensure that things are taken seriously and also help the discussion become both more professional and personal at the same time. It usually results in the mentee feeling more relaxed and willing to open up not only on the technical level but also on the emotional level.

The next important thing to tackle, before starting the journey, is for you and the mentee to set goals and objectives for your sessions together. Keep in mind that as I described in the last post — you don’t have to set your goals for the entire program and can choose to set different goals from time to time.

However, with no goals at all, it will be extremely hard for you to get somewhere (yes, I know, this is Product Management 101).

Here are the top 3 options for goal setting for PM mentorship:

1. The mentee has some career goal he or she wants to achieve in the next year (e.g., moving from being a product manager to being a product management group leader). Try to break this big goal into small, ready to action items or topics you can work on in each session
2. The mentee has some specific mid-term goals at work they want to do or achieve (e.g., initiate some new process at work). These will probably be action-focused discussion-items. I will highly recommend for you to make a short list of those (preferably in the first two weeks of the mentorship program) and discuss each with each other. You, as a mentor, may find out that you find yourself related to some items more than others and can decide to focus on these subjects
3. The mentee has no specific long-term or mid-term goal, and mostly want help in the day to day challenges. No worries!

Now it’s time for you guys to translate that daily product-manias into actionable discussion items you can base your meetings on.

Regardless of the goal, it is easier to tie the sessions to real-life problems and not to theoretic cases. Relating to real-life (preferably recent) issues, help guiding the mentee to challenge herself by asking the right questions. When the mentee asks too many theoretical questions, the session might easily slip into consulting instead of mentoring.

Last but not least, make sure to discuss your mutual commitments as mentioned above.

Once the primary goal is defined, and your commitments are clear, it’s easier to plan each session and make sure focus is maintained.

As we’ve proved before, mentoring is not so different from product management. Your primary role is to be the focus advocate and stir the discussions.