Advice to a Mentoree
When you’ve been entrusted with helping a novice onto their feet professionally – where do you start?
Here is what comes to my mind:
- Be true to yourself and your objective
- Don’t take ‘no’ for an answer quickly
- Perfect your networking skills
- Perfect your listening skills
- Observe your competition (direct, indirect, local, interstate, worldwide)
- Keep a consistent business image
- Observe expected business etiquette when it comes to appearance and punctuality
- Know your numbers – observe your cash-flow and debtors constantly (amongst other data!)
- Don’t be afraid to ask for help when required
- Embrace technology and the changes that it brings
What about you? What were some of the things you were advised when you first started or advice you would leave to someone in hindsight?
I haven’t had the opportunity of being a mentee up until recently but have mentored quite a few people. In this instance I am talking about my experience being a mentor.
I start the relationship off by getting to know the mentee a little beforehand. Just casual chat to find out a little about them and what makes them tick. Then I would ask them general questions about their business and from there what challenges they have in their business and what their goals are and what they are hoping to achieve.
From there we would set some small achieveable tasks and goals for the mentee to work on and report back on at the next meeting.
Start the beginning of the meeting with 5 min. of general chit chat before getting on with the business of mentoring to put the mentoree at ease.
Also try to stay within an allocated agreed timeframe (eg 1/2 to 1 hour) because there will be a lot of new information to absorb.
(Sometimes I wondered who the mentee and mentor actually was because I would also get a lot out of it!)
There is so much to offer people who are starting out in business. The big one for me is give yourself permission to make mistakes and learn from them. Mistakes are the quickest way to teach you what not to do. Have them use you, as their mentor, to discuss what happened, what they learnt and next time what will they do different. These technique will move people thru their ’stuff’ quickly and expand their comfort zone.
Other things I would work with new business people about is, learn to love selling (if they do not already), be clear on what they are wanting to achieve from there business and with whom and constantly use mentors or coaches to run ideas past and discuss how they can constantly improve.