Mentoring, if done skillfully should not come across like a Q&A session. Mentees will often come along to meet a new mentor and try and make the meeting all about the mentor, asking for the mentor’s advice, the mentor’s wisdom, the mentor’s experiences, the mentor’s guidance etc. Please, mentors, resist this!
It’d be very closed-minded to say there should be no advice given or stories shared in mentoring, there’s a right time and place for advice. But it certainly shouldn’t be the core of what a mentoring partnership is about. I wrote more here about the pros and cons of the advice-based mentoring model if you’re interested in why.
The idea I want to focus on in this post is the idea of the mentor as the ‘sounding board’ — a listener who amplifies the mentee’s voice, not their own. In which the mentor, by listening to understand, not to reply (not to respond ‘yes but’) supports the mentee to talk things out loud, to externalise their thoughts, in order to:
(1) articulate what they have experienced, how they have reacted to it, and what they understand about it and what they learned form it; and (2) to decide how to proceed forward.
Mentees often need to hear what they have said, in order to make sense and understand what they think. The advice model skips step 1 and offers a way forward that’s not based in the mentee’s experience, but in the mentor’s. Being listened to and getting things of our chest gives us emotional relief. Not being listened to because the mentor-is-talking-now is the opposite. It can be experienced as frustrating, and invalidating, and disempowering.
Listening to reply is how we converse most of the time. What that means in mentoring is that instead of actually paying attention to what the other person is saying to you, you are inside your own head, thinking about what you want to say in response that might help them.
When I teach workshops on the principles and practices of mentoring and coaching, I give participants a practice run of 10-15min where I forbid advice giving even if that means long pauses or awkward silences. I then ask partners how it went and we unpick the impact of using that style of mentoring. Mentors at that point focus on the fact that they experienced the exercise as ‘hard’ because it’s an ‘unfamiliar’ way of working. But let’s listen to the mentees, look what say about the opportunity to waffle on unrestrained:
“When I heard talk to her, and vocalise the ludicrous situation I was in, I had to put it into a coherent sentence, that means that I had to make it make sense as a story instead of, you know, turning it over and over, gong back and forth over bits of he issue in my head. So then I thought about what the story I was telling actually was, and because I could see it laid out, I could understand what my role in that story was, and it all became a lot clearer that what I need to do is go back to my colleague. The one that I had the awkward conversation with. I have to do now, what I wanted the person in my story to do, it’s the obvious thing to do and when I laid it all out clearly it was very obvious.”
“When I got to the end of describing the problem I’m having, I felt like I’d already made up my mind about what I could do, I talked round in a circle and by through sorting the facts I became very determined all of a sudden to do that, I went right off to do it. All my mentor said, was things to reassure me that it made sense to them what I was saying, and that my choice about what to do about it also made sense.”
“It turned out not to be one issue but three and now I’ve separated them. It’s funny because I came here saying I wanted to get advice, but when it looked like my mentor was going to give me some advice, I was like, hang on through, I need to finish this thought, because I think my idea that I just had is better than the one you are going to say. I didn’t want my thought to be interrupted cos I was on a roll. My mentor’s cool and did a great job but he can’t possible get to grips with how complicated this is for me, and how much it’s ground me down, from just a 10min chat.”
Listening to understand is a practice, and it takes practice. Your role, as a mentor is not to hear the question and then to provide the solution. That’s a very transactional approach to mentoring. Instead focus on keeping the mentee thinking and processing through talking. Your key mentor tools here are summary and paraphrase — different ways of reflecting back what your mentee has said to you. Summary, is to summarise in their own words. Paraphrase to give a short recap using your own phrasing of the situation. Either way you are reflecting their experience back to them, not jumping straight in with your own.
Listen past the words too, listen for excitement, to energy levels, and notice when they are not excited or energetic. You can also (at an appropriate moment) offer meta-comment e.g. “When you talk about X you get really enthusiastic, is that right?” or “I notice that when you talk about Y your head went down, have I understood you right?” — or feed in whatever listener observations you have made and check back with your mentee.
A word of caution, don’t ‘do-the-active-listening’ for the sake of it. The purpose isn’t that you will demonstrate to the speaker – ‘hey I am listing now, because, hey, I am a good listener and a great mentor’. Mentees can always spot an inauthentic listener; don’t make it about you.
The real benefit is actually that you might learn something from or about them. As a deep listener you will build the mentoring relationship as well as supporting your mentee to think, taking it from a more transactional partnership to a more transformative partnership.
Think Ahead Blog 