Need a mentor? Or several? Follow this guide to find the perfect mentor.
What Is a Mentor?
A mentor is someone who informally helps support you grow your skills, ideas and goals.
Mentorship is a great tool to help emerging young leaders advance innovative ideas, and find success in career and life.
Without question, youth have the capacity to generate positive change, but often the greatest barriers to engagement are a lack of shared experiences, knowledge of how to access available tools and resources, and a support network to help young people trouble shoot their visions as they encounter successes and failures.
Many people and causes encourage students to make a difference in their communities, but few offer the tools to help them implement their ideas or ensure that the process of doing good is both personally sustainable and rewarding.
Mentorship that provides sustained engagement, peer-to-peer education, and opportunities to learn from failure and celebrate success can help translate passion and raw talent into tangible results, sustained community engagement, and lasting leadership character.
Types of Mentors
- Experience: Find a mentor who has more experience with goals similar to yours.
- Peer: Find mentors within your age group that have similar experience.
- Distance: Sometimes it helps if the mentor and mentee are from different backgrounds and locations.
- Group: It’s possible to find one mentor who can pair with multiple mentees.
- Shared: As a mentee, it’s possible to have multiple mentors with different backgrounds and goals.
- Just Ahead: As Dev Aujla suggests, this is a mentor who is not far removed from the position you are in, be it career, experience or age.
- Elder: This type of mentor has lived many years and learned from many experiences, and is often respected in their community as a valued knowledge-holder.
Finding a Mentor
- Look within your own social network, school or place of work for a mentor.
- Search online for mentors through LinkedIn or find someone you can relate to based on media interviews.
- Browse through company directories and profiles, or post secondary faculty membership lists, to find someone you might be able to learn from.
- Ask your parents, siblings or guardians if they know of anyone who might be a suitable mentor.
- Use connection tools like Mentoring Canada to find a mentor or learn more about the value of mentorship.
Successful Mentorship
- Build trust and make sure you are always listening.
- Communicate clearly and regularly.
- Enter meetings with questions that contribute to you reaching your goals.
- Encourage each other to learn and grow.
- Accept negative feedback as a form of growth.
- Hold each other accountable for the relationship.
- Regularly evaluate the relationship and modify goals as you see fit.
- Know when the relationship is not working, or you are ready to move on to a new relationship.
Sample Mentorship Plan
A good plan for mentorship will vary depending on the needs of the mentee and the experience level of both the mentor and mentee.
Use this example to set a general plan for a mentor/mentee relationship:
Step 1: Introduction to Mentorship
- Establish goals and expectations.
- Review the roles and responsibilities of the mentor and mentee.
- Discuss the benefits of mentorship and what results you would both like to achieve with the relationship.
Step 2: Needs Assessment
- Conduct a needs assessment to identify the areas where the mentee needs help and the areas in which the mentor can help.
- Set specific goals and objectives based on the needs assessment.
Step 3: Skill Development
- Develop a plan for developing the specific skills the mentee needs to achieve their goals and how the mentor will assist.
- Identify resources and activities that can help the mentee build their skills, such as online courses, workshops or shadowing opportunities.
Step 4: Feedback and Support
- Discuss the importance of providing feedback and support to the mentee.
- Develop strategies for giving constructive feedback and providing emotional support.
Step 5: Networking
- Discuss the importance of networking and making connections in the mentee’s field.
- Identify strategies for building a professional network, such as attending events, participating in online forums or joining professional organizations.
Step 6: Goal Setting and Action Planning
- Determine how to assess the mentee’s progress and identify areas that need further development.
- Develop a plan for the mentee to continue their development beyond the mentorship program.
Step 7: Closing and Reflection
- Discuss the impact of the mentorship on the mentee’s personal and professional development.
- Reflect on the experience and discuss what could be improved for future mentorship opportunities.
- Make a plan to stay connected with each other if the relationship still has value.
Again, this plan is just a guideline. It’s important to maintain flexibility and adapt as needed to ensure the best possible outcome for both the mentor and mentee.