Marcela Kane: To be a Mentor

Throughout the course of her career, Marcela Kane has provided mentorship to a number of her team members with the goal of helping them to develop professionally. 

"As a researcher, I can tell you that how you best match people is probably the issue where we know the least about," says Tammy Allen, a professor of psychology at the University of South Florida and co-author of Designing Workplace Mentoring Programs: An Evidence-Based Approach." 

You can almost think about this as some type of dating service. She's also seen companies use random processes for matching, such as picking names out of a hat. But she says the programs in which the participants have some input are usually the most successful.

Doesn't really matter how you get there but If you are in a position to provide mentorship to others, it is important that you do what you can to develop your skills by considering all of the following pointers.

Listen

While it is important that you impart wisdom on your mentees when appropriate, you also need to understand the crucial role that listening plays. If you don’t, you may find that you struggle to get to the root of the issues that your mentees are dealing with, which could lead them to seek mentorship from others who are more capable of fulfilling their needs.

Offer Guidance

There is a fine line between offering guidance to somebody and doing work for them, so it is important that you take steps to not cross this line. Your role as a mentor is to help others with their professional developments, so you need to understand that offering point blank solutions is not the best way to go about things. This will prevent others from figuring out problems on their own and make them overly-reliant on others for solutions.

                                                                       Marcela Kane

As stated by John Reh The original Mentor is a character in Homer’s epic poem: The Odyssey. When Odysseus, King of Ithaca went to fight in the Trojan War, he entrusted the care of his kingdom to Mentor. Mentor served as the teacher and overseer of Odysseus' son, Telemachus.

The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines a mentor as "a trusted counselor or guide." Others expand on that definition by suggesting that a mentor is "someone who is helping you with your career, specific work projects or general life advice out of the goodness of his or her heart.

Good mentors tend to have a number of common traits, of which the below are amongst the most important.

Expertise

In order to act as a mentor, you must have expertise in your field that you are willing and able to pass on to other people. As such, mentors are constantly looking to improve their knowledge bases so that they can help others make their own improvements. Furthermore, they will be able to use their own experiences to relate the lessons they teach to real-life scenarios.

Positivity

If you are unable to demonstrate enthusiasm for what you do and your work with the people that you mentor, you are going to find it much more difficult to inspire confidence in others. As such, good mentors tend to have positive mindsets that allow them to approach challenges with the aim of solving them, rather than considering them to be issues that prevent them from doing their work.

Observational Skills

Marcela Kane notes that the best mentors are constantly observing. They will keep an eye on their industries but, most importantly, they will also look out for the people that they are mentoring. This allows them to provide valuable feedback that can help their mentees in their careers.