Mentoring - Santa Fe Leadership Center

You?re fulfilling leadership role in a school as a department chair, division director, dean or head of school.? Whether you like it or not, and despite what your job description includes (or omits), you should also be playing the critical role of mentor.? You might be thinking now, ?Whom do I mentor?? Do I need to mentor everyone I supervise? What exactly does a mentor do?? And am I doing it??? Good mentoring is probably the single most effective and most economical form of professional development you can provide your school.

If you are supervising other individuals you are likely serving in a mentor capacity to some of them already.? But unless you have formally communicated this to a mentee and have taken ownership of that role, you might not be doing it very well or with a sense of purpose. Mentoring is a two-way street and it happens most successfully when both the mentor and the mentee claim their roles and consider how they can make the most of their relationship. While you certainly can serve as a mentor to every single one of your direct reports, there needs to be an acknowledgement and a desire on the part of both mentor and mentee that this relationship exists. Mentoring members of your community who are not under your supervision might be even more effective due to the low risk nature of that relationship.

So what exactly is mentoring and how does it differentiate from evaluation and assessment??? Mentoring is not synonymous with evaluation.? In fact, it is quite the opposite. Mentoring reserves judgment and instead allows for mentors to hold up a proverbial mirror for mentees and provide them not with answers but rather questions that focus on self-reflection, growth and improvement.

Mentoring is not just modeling.? We often hear from participants in our seminar that they lead others by setting a good example.? This is all well and good, but it does not substitute for direct, purposeful, open and honest conversation that happens between mentor and mentee when the right questions are asked.? Leading by example is important, as one does not want to be viewed as acting hypocritically,? but it is a passive approach to sharing one?s expertise.

Mentoring is not synonymous with coaching.? Leadership coaches have come into vogue and for good reason.? Coaches provide a level of training and skill development that benefits new leaders. But like athletic coaches, they prescribe exercises such as case studies to help leaders build their problem solving muscles and they offer advice based on their own experiences.? Mentoring is less prescriptive and more reflective.? It is less driven by the knowledge of the mentor and more by the needs of the mentee.

Mentoring benefits both the mentor and the mentee. While strong mentorships are clearly grounded in the professional development of the mentee, the mentor gains in spades an opportunity to think purposefully about his or her own proactive. Teacher mentoring programs for new teachers are becoming more common in independent schools as ways to develop teachers new to the profession and to provide opportunities for experienced teachers to grow. Shady Hill School and Bank Street were early pioneers but these programs have sprouted all over the country.? Here in the There comes a natural opportunity for self-reflection as a mentor helps a mentee to process his

Last Sunday?s New York Times Corner Office featured Venture Capitalist Tony Tjan who has supervised others since he was a teenager and has come to mentoring after many years as a manager and leader and having benefitted from mentors himself.? He and his partner Mats Lederhausen use a basic framework for mentoring that was inspired by Deepak Chopra and it includes five questions: 1) What is it that you really want to be and do?? 2) What are you doing really well that is helping you to get there? 3) What are you not doing that is preventing you from getting there? 4) What will you do differently tomorrow to meet those challenges? 5) How can I help and where do you need the most help?? Tjan writes, ?The sequence is important.? You have to understand the larger purpose; understand the person?s self-awareness around their strengths; understand external or intrinsic blocks to doing that; and understand the person?s plan and motivation to change before you assume you can help.?

The International Mentoring Association credits good mentoring with increased retention, greater staff diversity and inclusion, enhanced staff performance, improved leadership succession, and the great benefit of organizations functioning as learning communities.? Our schools are constantly looking for ways to develop these same qualities.? If you don?t have a formal mentorship program it?s not hard to start one, but it does take the commitment of two individuals who agree on the relationship, the time to meet regularly, and a set of reflective questions that can be revisited, and the courage to engage in open and honest dialogue.

Source: http://santafelead.org/mentoring-not-always-in-the-job-description-but-inherent-to-leadership/

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