Experience plays an important role in our work. Unfortunately, experience takes time to acquire and you don’t always have the time to walk a path that gradually allows you to get it. Rather happens quite often that you are just thrown into water to see if you can swim, making experience gathering slightly more complicated.
Luckily, there are tools like mentoring that help you be more effective quickly, while also building strong bonds with people.
Mentoring is the development of a relationship, a partnership between two individuals in which a more experienced person guides the less experienced person, developing and strengthening their skills. The participants in the relationship, the topic and the place where the process takes place vary based on the organisational context, but there are some common traits that characterise a good mentor:
- Be interested, not only in the subject, but also in people. A level of interest in the subject you want to mentor and in your colleague: nothing is more effective than passion combined with competence and “taking care” of those in front of you.
- Mentoring is not a part time job. A commitment to mentoring activity is fundamental: being a mentor is a job at work and requires discipline in facing the path. Discipline and commitment that must be present both in those who transfer and in those who learn.
- Be confident in yourself and act accordingly. Transferring one’s experience requires being confident of your capability to be able to do it, of being able to systematise what you have learned and transfer it clearly.
- Listen and communicate. Supporting a younger or less experienced resource means knowing how to communicate and, above all, listening so as to perceive doubts and blocks that can jeopardise the success of the learning project. Listening and communicating are never enough.
- Be positive to add value. Transferring what one has learned is not depriving yourself of something but enhancing what has been learned and passing it on. It is therefore something to do with a positive and collaborative attitude not as something in which you are obliged.
- Success of the others is your success. Transferring experience and seeing it acquired is an enormous satisfaction. The path is never easy, but when you get to the bottom you are rewarded for all the effort made no matter how great it was.
- Learning and striving for excellence never stop. Curiosity and willingness to stay up to date in one’s work is a fundamental element both for learners and for those who guide the learning process.