5 Facts About Mentor Training You Need To Know

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He encouraged me, challenged me, and taught me passion for our shared pursuit. I learned early on that if I wanted to check in with him, I wouldn’t find him in his office.

He had a little cubbyhole in the library, and it was there I most often found him. Why? He knew—and he taught me—that to be an excellent professor, he also needed to be a passionate student.

At the same time, I was an Air Force instructor pilot teaching aspiring pilots my craft. We instructors had an occasional opportunity to fly without students in what we called “continuation training.”

Even when flying with students, we often took control of the aircraft to fly one of the maneuvers or a landing ourselves. We did it for the same reason my professor was in the library. We knew that to be good instructor pilots, we must also be excellent pilots. Just sitting watching a student fly would, over time, atrophy our skills and make us less able to teach well.

You are might be wondering, “I thought this blog was about mentor training!”

It is.

To be an excellent mentor, the first—and most important—thing is to…

 

Be Mentored

The best mentor training begins with being mentored. Most of what I know about being a good mentor I learned from my own mentor in the experience and process he used with me. But, like my professor or fellow instructor pilots, I’ll never reach a place where I know all there is about mentoring and I can stop learning and “just mentor.”

To grow, stretch, expand, and master the skill of mentoring, I must continue being mentored.

At Leadership Design Group, we encourage life-long mentoring and being mentored. We have seen good, solid mentoring skills developed in teens. Likewise, we have seen people in their 70s and 80s still being mentoring and growing in their own lives from that experience.

If you want to be an excellent mentor, find an excellent mentor and allow him or her to mentor you.

 

Listen, Don’t Talk

Exceptional mentors are great listeners. Mentor training MUST develop good listening skills. See our blog post, “Looking With Your Ears”

This is doubly true in whole-life mentoring. So often, when digging into a particular concern or problem the core issue is rooted in a separate area of a person’s life from the one where it becomes exhibited or expressed. Intentional listening will often allow a mentor to see the core issue expressed, sometimes even before the mentoree recognizes it.

If you want to be an excellent mentor, learn to listen well.

 

Ask, Don’t Tell

The best of mentors ask great questions.

At Leadership Design Group, we often are asked the difference between mentoring and coaching. Think back to your own experience in sports, or music, or art…what was your coach like? Coaches know the right thing to do. Coaches tell you how to do it. They watch you perform and correct your errors. In a game or performance, they set the strategy and lead. Coaches tell.

Mentors, on the other hand are experts at helping the mentoree find the right way for himself or herself. Mentors ask about desires and values, goals and fears, motivators and inhibitors. Well-crafted questions allow those they mentor to reach their own conclusions about what is right and the right way to achieve all they are designed to be. Mentors ask.

If you want to be an excellent mentor, learn the art of crafting intentional questions.

 

See the Whole Person

Mentoring training, advice, blogs and books abound. Like any topic, some are good, some awful. Most fall at some point between the extremes.

What most often is lacking in mentor training is a holistic view of mentoring. At Leadership Design Group, we have found the most effective mentoring is to mentor the whole, 8-dimensional person.

Vocational mentoring is good; it is valuable. But it is self-limiting since it stops at the door of the company, or organization, or workplace. People are far more than what they do.

The best mentors seek to help the person be what they want to be. In achieving that, we can also help them be a better worker, or supervisor, or boss.

If you want to be the best mentor possible, learn to see your mentoree as a whole person.

 

Mentor

Like any great skill, mentoring is best learned by…well, mentoring.

There is, for sure, a place for some “classroom” or guided learning. But great pianists don’t become great by watching videos of piano theory.

Peyton Manning didn’t become a great quarterback by watching footage of his father. The best mentor training requires guided and supervised mentoring from more experienced mentors.

At Leadership Design Group, we train Master Mentors who are able to train others.

There is no shortcut, no magic dust…

If you want to be an excellent mentor, start mentoring. And work hard at finding an experienced mentor to help you improve.

Where did your own mentor training fall short?

We would enjoy a dialogue with you over how to improve mentor training. In 2015 we will establish the School of Mentoring. We would welcome you being a part of that. For further talk about this, please contact me at my email, listed below.

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