Solution Saturday: What Would You Do
Being a mentor is an ego building experience for immature leaders. What do you do, when a mentee asks, “What would you do?”
Self-importance motivates mentors to prematurely spew “pearls of wisdom.”
Rushing to give advice short-circuits the opportunity for others to find their path forward.
Self-importance distracts mentors from the focus of the relationship, the mentee.
Stop talking, if you can’t wait to talk.
Tell me what to do:
Never tell anyone what to do until they’ve tried some of their own solutions. “What have you tried,” is one of the first questions to ask mentees who want you to tell them what to do.
Expect others to solve our problems – for us – is weak and irresponsible.
Always develop at least three options before asking an advisee to choose one. Don’t tell people what to do. Help them find options and let them choose.
Choosing an option invites responsibility and growth, but telling mentees what to do invites dependence.
The gift:
Invite mentees to reflect, rather than giving answers. One of the great gifts you give a person is the opportunity to reflect on their journey, while you listen.
Withhold answers. Perhaps your mentee struggles with frustration, fear, uncertainty, intolerance, abrasiveness, or talking too much.
Don’t solve it until you observed it.
Invite mentees to spend a week reflecting on a troubling behavior, frustration, for example.
- When is frustration most obvious?
- What behaviors manifest when you’re frustrated?
- What do others do when they see your frustration?
- What does frustration accomplish for you?
- If you weren’t frustrated, what would you be?
When mentors rush to give answers, they rob mentees of the opportunity to reflect.
How might mentors respond to, “What do you think?”
When is it useful for mentors to share what they would do?
Dan a great post and topic. I was involved in one of the first formal company to company mentoring programs with Menttium, a not for profit.
They believed the Mentee should run the program or start and drive the car and we Mentors should just help steer. This involves a lot of listening as you stated.
The other aspect I have learned is that sometimes we can try to impose our knowledge on others when in a ideal mentoring relationship the Mentee choses the Mentor.
Brad
Brad James
Were I asked this question, my response would be: “I would recognize this as an opportunity to innovate and create. I would risk experimentation to find the best solution to this problem.”
I’d probe the mentee to try and discern whether he or she is subtly, unconsciously, shifting responsibility for learning and problem solving onto me. Our public education system trains people to imagine that the responsibility for learning rests on the teacher.
Also, as a mentor, I would be careful to guard myself. Stress, contrary to popular imagination, does not come from hard work or many responsibilities. Stress comes from taking on the emotional baggage of others.
Your right Dan, one of our goals here is to have the staff member and or client be okay thinking through a decision, trusting their judgement and accepting the consequences thereafter. Praise the good results or review the not so good ones but remind them that with each time they make a decision, they will get better at it. We want them to OWN their own process.
Great post. Really hit home with me, particularly “Never tell anyone what to do until they’ve tried some of their own solutions” with regard to reality-based training. Many years ago, we would watch a training exercise and then critique it – here’s what you did, here’s what you could have done. It was not a good learning experience. But we learned that it’s better and more effective for the participants when they first critiqued themselves – here’s what I think I did and could have done better. It’s a more powerful learning approach. And, when they were done, we would fill in the blanks with our own observations and suggestions for improvement. If we are to learn from our mistakes, we must personally be able to recognize and acknowledge the mistakes firsthand before intervention or assistance from others. Thanks, Dan.
I’ve never officially mentored someone (unless you count raising my six children!), but will be doing so this coming year – a journey I am very excited about!
When reflecting on your question, When is it useful for mentors to share what they will do?, this comes to mind: Share when it’s not about the mentee trying to earn the mentors approval and desiring to do things the mentors way, so share when it’s a reflection or debriefing period and the mentor/mentee are brainstorming together options that could be explored in future scenarios.
Great advice – as usual!!! I believe it should be a long way down the road before those three or more options. Yes, they need to reflect and consider options as you write – guided by the coach. Then try one of the options identified. May very well not go well. They need to REFLECT on the effort and revise option or options, choose one, and engage – with your mentoring.
I’d also add the timing be considered as well. IF they have the week you mention, fine. If they don’t or eventually even if they do, I believe they need to consider the impact of a time crunch.
My preferred approach would be understanding their goal or desired outcome, what they have done, what options have they considered, why they did what they did or did not do, and let them decide the course that would be the best in their interest.
I have learned that what I think is less helpful to them, but facilitating them to their own conclusion is the most effective for them.
A good example is someone who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.
Why was only a single man created first? So that virtue and vice may not be claimed as hereditary, and so that “man” not accept sole responsibility for either blame or credit.
Creation vs. Evolution is the difference of WHO did it verses…WHAT happened? In my estimation, Creation is of God and is the beginning. Evolution is of man, and is about continuation, change, adaptation and progress over time.
Now, what does all this have to do with leadership and today’s blog on mentoring?
First, it is my opinion that leaders must encourage staff members to “think deep,” and take them to conversations and discussions beyond the issue at hand. Secondly, I believe leaders can use controversial topics—like the creation vs. evolution debate—to illuminate, explore and discover common ground between how things begin and how things evolve…through no fault of their own. And it is my opinion, both mentors and mentees benefit greatly by the dialogue that is created when the subject is not the crisis at hand, rather a back and forth conversation on “a topic that seems totally unrelated”—until the mentor makes it so.
For example, to see clearly, we must see the whole. We must see how life began vs. how life developed. The incredible part of the story are things–which began thus, and developed thus. To understand the beginning, we must not indulge in imagination or we can imagine anything. Anyone thinking what “might” have happened may conceive a sort of evolutionary equality: If there was ever a moment when man was only an animal–we can choose to make a picture of his career transferred to some other animal…an entertaining fantasia.
But considering what did happen, we decide man has distanced everything else like astronomical spaces and a speed like the still bolt of light. We contemplate, not imagine, God and man through the ages as thought and everlasting enthusiasm, without rival or resemblance, and still as new as we are old—much like the “problems of man,” and “man as the problem.” And for every problem, man has an answer. In fact, man is the answer.
With inexperienced mentees that fall in a low Readiness category they must sometimes be told, in an effective fashion, in order for them to be able to move forward. There certainly is a place for telling in leadership. What are your thoughts Freaky Dan? 🙂 Great post…..thanks.
This is such great information and goes beyond mentoring…This is wisdom for life. Wish I had read this while home schooling my kids 10 years ago.