Effective Mentoring Techniques
Mentoring Strategies
As you begin to embark on your career and begin to interact and utilize your own apprentice(s), there are several roles with which you will have to become comfortable. Those roles are interpersonal, informal, and decisional. Captured within these three roles are four learning strategies that should be considered when working with apprentices; coaching, practicing, assessing, and reinforcement. These are described below.
Roles of the Mentor
Interpersonal Roles
Mentors are required to interact with a substantial number of people during a workweek. They may have conversations or meetings with other journeypeople, supervisors, site supervisors or managers, project teams, owners, suppliers, and the general public. Numerous studies have shown that good relationships are the backbone for getting things done and increasing efficiency as well as effectiveness. Relationships are the richest source of information for mentors because of their personal nature and their immediate impact upon daily operations.
Mentors are also responsible for the work of the people in their unit, and their actions in this regard are directly related to their role as a leader. The influence of senior apprentices and/or journeypersons is most clearly seen in the leadership/mentorship role. Formal authority to train others rests upon them and provides an opportunity for great potential in personal and professional growth. Their leadership determines, in a large degree, how successful they will become as well as how successful and confident their apprentices become.
Does the leader’s/mentor’s role matter? Just ask any journeyperson who has accomplished great things in their career. Did they work hard to achieve their current status? Yes, but they will also talk about how specific mentors helped them grow in understanding not only the technical aspects of their craft but also the interpersonal aspects as well.
Informational Roles
Mentors are required to gather, collate, analyze, store, and disseminate many kinds of information. In doing so, they become information resource centers, often storing huge amounts of information in their own heads, moving quickly from the role of gatherer to the role of disseminator in minutes. Although many business organizations install large, expensive management information systems to perform many of those functions, nothing can match the speed and intuitive power of a well-trained mentor’s brain for information processing. Not surprisingly, most mentors prefer it that way.
In the informational role, mentors pass privileged information directly to subordinates, who might otherwise have no access to it. Mentors must decide not only who should receive such information, but how much of it, how often, and in what form. Increasingly, mentors are being asked to decide whether subordinates, peers, customers, business partners, and others should have direct access to information without having to contact the