Mentorship Essentials

By Michelle R. Davis, Writer

What do you need to be a mentor, and how can you boost the skills of the person you hope to counsel—as well as your own? Harvard Business Essentials’ Coaching and Mentoring: How to Develop Top Talent and Achieve Stronger Performance lays out techniques for doing both.

While managers often coach their employees in order to foster skill development, impart knowledge and boost successful behaviors, mentoring requires a much broader role. It includes developing a protégé’s skills and behaviors, but also takes a big-picture view of the person’s overall development.

For prospective mentors looking to establish a successful mentoring relationship, Coaching and Mentoring suggests these essentials:


Mutual respect. Each person must respect the other. The protégé must respect the mentor for his or her knowledge and accomplishments; the mentor must respect the protégé’s desire to learn and grow.


A logical fit. The mentor should have the skills and knowledge that the mentee is seeking. The two should have compatible personal styles or temperaments.


No political agenda. The protégé’s goal should be to learn, not to use the relationship to exploit the mentor’s position or connections.


Commitment. Both parties need to be invested in the goals of mentoring and willing to put in time and energy.

One of the most important steps in setting up the mentoring relationship is to get off to a good start. Establish rapport, insist on confidentiality, sketch out some mutually agreed-upon goals, ask questions and listen, talk about your own experiences as a mentee and how they helped you get where you are today. Also, be sure to schedule future meeting times.

If you’re thinking about becoming a mentor or are currently providing mentoring, here are some tips for improving your skills:

• Take advantage of a formal mentoring training program if it is available through your company or provided by an outside organization.
• To avoid sending mixed signals, make sure that you are modeling successful behavior.
• Give practical advice and feedback.
• Suggest measurable goals.
• Resist the temptation to solve your protégé’s problems. A mentor’s job is to help other people develop the skills to help themselves.
• Provide constructive criticism of behaviors, not the person.
• Challenge the protégé to develop a plan for success. Ask where he or she would like to be in five years, and offer suggestions or improvements to achieve that goal.
• Don’t allow the protégé to become dependent on you.