31 practical mentoring tips

During mentoring, it is important to keep in mind the goals and limits of the process. After all, it is easy to confuse it with other approaches, such as consulting, or forget essential steps that will lead to the desired outcome.

Through our practical experience, we have formulated these tips to help you maintain and pursue the expected development of the mentee.

1. Never skip planning a mentoring session.
2. Set the date for the next session at the end of each meeting.
3. To have a fair price, you need to be willing to lose clients.
4. Have a situational approach. Avoid rigid models.
5. Clearly define the rules of engagement.
6. Always evaluate the emotional and readiness state before starting a session.
7. Send techniques and tools in advance.
8. Always question convictions (sink the ship).
9. Mentoring can resolve many situations, but not all at once. Therefore, define the scope of work clearly.
10. Tangibilize the achieved results: demonstrate the before and after and clearly define the deliverables.
11. Mentoring is your experience applied to someone else’s business. Don’t be a signpost!
12. Have empathy in the right dose (self-responsibility + empowerment + challenge).
13. If it’s not part of the mentoring scope, think twice before giving space for the subject.
14. Practice active listening, not just attentive listening! (Active Listening Principle).
15. Define the agenda for the next session at the end of each meeting. This way, you will have time to prepare (guiding questions).
16. Train the techniques and tools before applying them.
17. Be congruent. Don’t preach things that you don’t believe in!
18. Always work with hypotheses, never convictions!
19. Create your toolbox (stories – speeches – techniques).
20. Reflect on your practices: What were the objectives of this meeting? What is my score for these objectives? What can I do to improve my work?
21. The success of a business depends more on strategy than opportunity.
22. An idea, to be good, needs to be polished.
23. Mentoring that is limited to a single meeting only solves specific problems. Systemic and strategic problems require a process.
24. No mentor is better than a good method, and no method works without a good mentor.
25. Tools and techniques support mentoring, but mentoring should not rely on tools. Beware of mentors who don’t use tools, but also of those who only use tools.
26. When the mentee is insecure, give a dose of confidence! When they are too sure, give a dose of uncertainty.
27. Amplify your questions. Avoid directive questions!
28. To break paradigms, identify limiting points.
29. Use benchmarking without moderation. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel.
30. Ask your mentee to write a report/summary of each meeting.
31. If the mentee has all the answers, the mentor is not asking the right questions (Challenge Principle).