Mentoring in the Workplace: 5 Tips to Be An Effective Mentor
We spend most of our lives at work. Yes, you read that correctly: not in a dream, but work. This is a new rule of an active person of the XXI century. Of course, you can quote the greats that you need to work not 24 hours a day, but with your head. This also has its own truth, but all-consuming work (without a plus or minus sign) is there and is not going to go anywhere.
As you know, if you want to do something well, do it yourself. So, an article for mentors, future mentors, students, and ourselves: about motivation, work, and love for our work. Without her, nowhere, especially in such an important matter as the third sector. Some of the famous mentoring saga’s include Steve Jobs mentoring Mark Zuckerberg, and Maya Angelou mentoring Oprah Winfrey.
What Is A Mentor?
Being a mentor is an emotionally difficult business that requires strength and time as well as physical and most importantly emotional preparation. Therefore, it is so important that a mentor really wants to do what he does. The difference between “I need” and “I want” to someone may seem significant and with a “selfish” skew of the second word, but it is this that is of great importance.
Sam Mizrahi Toronto is a real-estate developer, who has the highest skyscraper of Canada built by his firm, but it would not have been possible without proper mentoring of the team. Sam Mizrahi and his team at Mizrahi Developments are currently working on building The One, Toronto’s, first supertall residential and commercial skyscraper located on 1 Bloor West in the heart of the city.
If a person does not WANT to do something, but works, if not out of pressure, but at least out of habit, or because society WANTS so much, then this does not lead to anything good. Therefore, it is worth remembering such important tips:
- desire to participate in the program for a long time. Rome – it was not built in a week either;
- respect for the individual, their abilities, and the right to make their own choices in life. A very important quality for bosses (as mentors), and for ordinary mentors working with adolescents;
- lack of superman syndrome. Let’s clarify: mentors should not assume that their own solutions are the only correct ones.
Imagine a mentor who is constantly trying to solve a difficult question for a teenager, what do we get in the end? There are two options. First: a child who has forgotten how to think independently, who found himself in a world about which he had a rather superficial idea. Our colleagues from the regions, when we meet with them, always insist that post-educational support is almost more important than working within the institution itself.
The second option: this teenager or subordinate (since we are talking about mentoring as a multidisciplinary institution) understands that his own opinion is not taken into account. He is not able to offer anything sensible and is finally disappointed in his abilities.
We Continue Our To-Do List:
- the ability to listen (which we have already written about), as well as an important skill to accept different points of view. Mentors often help by simply listening, asking thoughtful questions, and giving the mentors the opportunity to explore their own thoughts with minimal interference;
- empathy or emotional intelligence;
Emotional intelligence is recognized as the most important. Competence that the younger generation should receive, starting from kindergarten. There are enormous resources outside the intellectual realm. These are emotions, the ability to understand others and oneself, as well as to live in conditions of constant self-development. It is emotions that motivate adolescents to learn and develop positive psychology.
