Premise:
One of the things that all leaders, sorry, all good leaders, get asked, is to mentor someone. The better the leader, the more such request that we tend to get. However, the time that we have for mentoring is fairly limited.
While the mentee’s benefit a lot from the mentoring, there are reasons to believe that mentoring also benefited me as much as a mentors. So, it is in our best interest to mentor as many people as we can, given our limited time, and do so in such a way that we don’t burn ourselves out.
Here are a couple of things that have helped me in this pursuit. You can pick up what works for you and try them on.
Group Mentoring:
While 1-1 mentoring is effective, it doesn’t scale very well. So, I tried group mentoring. You bring together a set of 5-6 people together and mentor them together. While it may seem that this doesn’t afford the individualised attention that mentees expect, if done well, we can overcome this through better facilitation and planning.
The added advantage of running group mentoring sessions is that the mentees can help each other and at the same time, questions from one mentee, when answered, could elicit further questions or insights amongst the participants. In my experience of running group mentoring, I have found that its benefits far outweigh those from running 1-on-1 mentorship.
Still, if anyone (including me) feels that there is something that can’t be discussed in the group setting, we can always go back to doing that one meeting 1-1 and get back to the group mentoring subsequently.
If these sessions are done using tech like MS Teams or Zoom, they can be recorded and shared later with the group. As a mentor, I could create a repository of content that I could use subsequently as needed. It also helped in creating an FAQ document or a set of FAQ videos and their responses that could be shared with new mentees so that they can be brought upto speed and new questions or insights be discussed.
Asynchronous Mentoring:
When one thinks of mentoring, usually, you think of a synchronous event. The mentor and the mentee get on a meeting (physical or virtual, 1-1 or in a group setting) and discuss things that needs mentoring. However, I have also found that the power of technology can help us scale our mentoring by leveraging asynchronous mentoring.
Asynchronous mentoring is when a mentee asks me a question, either via text or email or a voicemail and I answer the question or provide a suggestion or insight, whenever I find some time in my schedule. The best way that I have found to do that is to record a quick video on my phone. I first mention the question and provide some context if needed and answer the question and share the video with the mentee and we go back and forth.
The beauty is that I can respond whenever I have sometime. It also helps me get better at recording my own videos. It again helps me create a FAQ video series. If the insight useful for the group and the mentee is ok with me sharing this with the group, I share the same with the group as well.
In conclusion:
In conclusion, all I would say is that we can all benefit from being mentors and scale our ability to mentor more people, therefore helping more mentees in the process if we are open to trying both these options.
If you do try out either of them, I would love to hear your experience from the same. Please do share them with me. You know how to reach me.
