Three Things I Ask of my New Mentees
Unless you’re coachable, willing to challenge your own status quo, and get engaged, no amount of coaching or mentoring will ever make a difference!
There’s a saying that applies to mentorship: “When a doctor cares more about an illness than the patient does, that patient will never improve.” I love coaching and mentoring professionals. But I’ve found that, if mentees don’t care MORE than the mentor about improving their condition, they’re never going to achieve much improvement.
In helping individuals think, feel, and behave differently over the years, (and I’ve helped people from front-line contributors to senior executives), I’ve found three factors are essential to their success as well as mine. As a result, before I begin a new mentor/mentee relationship, I make these three simple requests.
1. Be coachable. You don’t have to like what I say. You don’t have to agree with what I say. But you will get dramatically further in your personal and professional growth if you listen, internalize, and try my suggestions. Open up your ears! Listen — not just to your coach, but to what others you respect and trust say as well. This requires thinking deeply about “what does this mean for me?” If you don’t open up your receptors, soak in the signals being sent, internalize and apply some of what you hear, you’re not really coachable.
2. Be willing to raise your abilities. Some people are too comfortable in the status quo to let it go. If you’re going to improve your performance, you must be willing to actually CHANGE! Coaching and mentoring is fundamentally focused on three things: Skills, knowledge, and behaviors. Skills you learn through practice. Knowledge is gained through doing. Behavior often creates the biggest impact you’re after. I can invest time and effort to work on all three with you. But I cannot control your behavior. I cannot make you do more of this or less of that: only you can, but first you have to be willing. What I look for in mentees could be plotted on an X/Y axis — the more willingness I perceive in you, the more confident I am that I can raise your ability.
3. Just do it. With apologies to Nike, the third request I ask is that you do the work. I can guide, I can recommend, suggest, mentor, cajole, cheer, but at the end of the day, coaching and mentoring is a contact sport. You have to roll up your sleeves, get in the trenches, and try some of the ideas that we develop together.
I genuinely believe relationships go bad with misaligned expectations. That’s why I work so hard up front to align expectations with new mentees, as well as to ascertain a baseline of current performance. What’s going well? What do they believe are areas for improvement? What are their processes? How do they engage with other people? What kind of support infrastructure is in place so they can deliver on what’s expected of them? What tools do they use? How do they focus and prioritize? More importantly, how do they analyze? I want to see if they compare results or outcome to inputs and efforts.
I would submit that most mentees understand their own strengths. The really sharp ones also understand where what I call their “growing edges” are. Most often, I find the growing edges relate to their skills in communication, consistency, and relationship development effort.
My process is to align expectations at the start, so mentees know what to expect. We create a baseline, and then track your performance improvement over time. Then I can mentor, and if needed, I can push, I can cajole, I can nudge. But after one or two coaching conversations, I start to see where this relationship is headed, and whether our expectations are misaligned. If I keep asking you if you’ve done some of the things we’ve talked about and you keep saying no, then I don’t get the sense you really are serious about this.
In my mentor/mentee relationships, I offer unlimited phone and email access to me. I’m baffled by why a mentee wouldn’t make use of that. Of those who don’t, I have to wonder: do they care about their growth as much as I would?
That’s why I prefer to know from the start: Are you coachable? Will you internalize the best practices we discuss? And most important, will you do the work to actually apply what we both agree would be worthwhile changes?
Nour Takeaways
- Mentees need to be coachable: able to not just hear, but think deeply about what they’re told.
- Mentees must be willing to behave differently in the future than in the past, as skills and knowledge acquisition increases their abilities.
- Mentees must try out the advice they’re given, and analyze results to see how the input of mentoring affects the outcomes they achieve.
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David Nour has spent the past two decades being a student of business relationships. In the process, he has developed Relationship Economics® — the art and science of becoming more intentional and strategic in the relationships one chooses to invest in. In a global economy that is becoming increasingly disconnected, The Nour Group, Inc. has worked with clients such as Siemens, Disney, KPMG and over 100 other marquee organizations in driving profitable growth through unique return on their strategic relationships. Nour has pioneered the phenomenon that relationships are the greatest off balance sheet asset any organizations possesses, large and small, public and private. He is the author of several books including the best selling Relationship Economics — Revised (Wiley), ConnectAbility (McGraw-Hill), The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Raising Capital (Praeger) and Return on Impact — Leadership Strategies for the age of Connected Relationships (ASAE). Learn more at www.NourGroup.com.
