16 Jul 4 Tips On How To Communicate Effectively With Your Mentees
What is communication?
Communication is the process of sharing ideas, opinions, facts and values from one individual or organization to another.
Being able to communicate effectively is one of the most important skills in life and has the power to affect growth in all aspects of your personal and professional life.
As laid out by business dictionary, effective communication is a two-way information sharing process which involves one party sending a message that is easily understood by the receiving party.
How Effective Communication Affects Mentoring
Effective communication in mentoring facilitates information sharing between mentors and mentees and can substantially increase the success rate of the mentoring relationship.
As with any relationship where information is being shared regularly, mastering effective communication is the foundation for success.
It is essential to building a trusting and healthy mentoring relationship as your mentees are still learning how to communicate successfully and they often look to you to take the lead and teach them how to communicate in this unique and oftentimes new relationship.
To ensure effective communication, Mentor Africa Foundation has provided 4 key points to keep you on course for effective communication.
4 Tips On How To Communicate Effectively With Your Mentees
1. Target
Your mentoring conversations need to have a target so you don’t wander.
A little digressing here and there during conversations of any nature are common, and if not curtailed can veer your mentee off course entirely.
While some mentoring communication styles choose to adopt a more laid back approach, these tend to be less productive and may not serve the greater purpose of the mentoring relationship.
It is, therefore, best to set a mentoring target at the beginning of your journey and frame subsequent interactions around set targets.
Using the chat feature on our web and mobile app, mentors can build and share some communication framework mentees can access and follow.
This means mentors and mentees decide before-hand what they seek to get out of the mentoring relationship including milestones and time frame with a conversational guide your mentees can apply to their work while keeping their eyes on the prize at all times.
2. Conversation Flow
As a mentor, you should tailor your mentoring sessions with a familiar flow that can be replicated across sessions, styles and audiences.
A good conversation flow to adopt is the knowledge model where sessions open with the mentee detailing the actions they have taken since the last meeting.
This includes what they picked and implemented, how they implemented it, how successful or unsuccessful the endeavour was and what could have been done better.
By introducing this model, you can create an effective feedback cycle with your mentee and mould their attitudes towards receiving or giving feedback.
3. Consistency
Mentoring can be taxing.
It involves you taking out valuable time you could spend on developing your career and dedicating it to building someone else’s.
For this reason, a lot of people are averse to the role or treat it as a minor inconvenience.
However, to get the benefits accrued to you and your mentee from this relationship you need to apply consistency in your communication.
This means fixing consistent and frequent sessions. Meeting once every few weeks or once a month might seem like an easier route but will most likely derail your set target and diminish the nature of the relationship.
Frequent meetings also allow you to have shorter meetings, smaller achievable goals and assist your mentee make small consistent incremental steps to keep the relationship moving along smoothly.
A mentoring conversation model using these methods gives you the power to break down your monthly goal into smaller agendas and help your mentee climb the career ladder one fruitful step at a time.
4. Active Listening
At the top of the communication technique pyramid is active listening.
Active listening entails by-passing the natural human response to listening to other people which is applying it to our own lives and replying to share our perspective, to giving complete attention to what the other person is saying in other to process and understand their feelings in entirety.
Mentors can practice active listening by focusing on what their mentees are saying at the moment, removing judgement and personal bias, working hard at building trust, being mindful of your tone when you respond and asking open-ended questions one at a time.
Whenever we communicate, we either build on or dismantle pre-existing pillars of our relationship hence we have to be critical of our engagements to ensure we further our relationships rather than tear them down.
By implementing these key points in your relationship you provide a positive framework for productive and effective communication. To implement these steps in your relationship be sure to download our app on Play Store to meet eager young minds.
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