5 Mistakes You Should Avoid When Mentoring

This guest post was written by a very young journalist, Mia Stokes. This is how she defines herself: “I am a journalist. I use my writing skills in a professional manner to help people to find something useful, informative and relevant to their interests. I’m happy to share my knowledge, tips, and advice in my articles. I find writing to be one, not just a hobby but passion.” I believe in giving young people a chance, so here it is.

Effective mentoring can lead to individual and organizational wonders. One of the biggest reasons why top corporates hire life and management coaches to train their employees is to boost their employees’ morale and motivate them as they grow along with the company. It can be seen as a solution to prevent individuals from “working for the weekend” and inspire them to take joy in the work they do throughout the week.

If you are a manager at a company and think that you yourself are responsible for coaching the members of your team, you must understand the areas which you must and must not visit. Mentoring can seem easier, but since it involves dealing directly with people, you always need to exercise caution.

Here are the top five mistakes you should avoid while mentoring your team members:

Failing to Provide Feedback

One of the biggest reasons why people quit jobs is not money-related but appreciation-related. Lack of feedback for good work can lead the best of your team to take the door. You may be a star manager who gives all types of management advice, but if you fail to provide feedback to the quality work that your team members put in, they are going to be demotivated. Before you realize, they will be looking for new jobs, which is going to affect your team and its work.

Solving this issue is easy: you acknowledge your team’s efforts whenever they do a great job. This is especially crucial when you are training a new intern. After giving them an assignment, you must provide instant feedback. It does not matter if the feedback is positive or negative because coaching is all about being transparent.

Delaying the Coaching Meetings

A good mentor needs to coach a new team member early on.

A lot of managers think of acting on time, but fail to do so. When welcoming a new member in the team, they keep the coaching bit for later and ask the person to carry on with what they did in their previous job. This can have drastic effects on the overall productivity of the team because the damage is already done – the person has already carved himself to the type of work that he thinks is better for the team. As a manager, you are at blame here as you could have coached him right in the beginning when he joined and things would have been different now.

To avoid this situation, coaches need to have a plan in their mind even before new employees come in. The coaching plan should also depend on the amount of experience an individual has and the work culture of the company among other things

Judging

Being a manager, a mentor and a coach for your teammates may be a bit overwhelming. These hats often do not work well with each other. Especially, people need extra credit when they start a new job and mess up.

Judging individuals based on their past work and thinking that they are incapable of doing only a specific work is not the right way to go. Instead, coaches can assess an individual’s strengths and weaknesses and then start their coaching process. For example, if a person is good at client handling, the coach must use him for that purpose, and not for something else that he has no experience in.

However, on the other hand, if the person himself asks for a diverse portfolio, coaches must consider their requests. This brings us to the next mistake.

Not Listening

A common mistake that coaches can commit is not listening to the people who they are coaching. Similar to how important feedback is, coaches need to hear out their employees during the coaching process. In the above example, if an employee is comfortable enough to take up a new line of work, coaches should not prevent them. Instead, they must consider this request and guide them to the right path. See how they fare with that particular task and then rework your project plan accordingly.

Lack of proper communication is often regarded as one of the biggest issues in corporate employee management.

Managers are often the worst mentors: they are simply too busy to coach effectively. If you have pressing deadlines and nerve-wracking risk management, would you have a patience to really listen to a wide-eyed kid telling you things you heard 20 times? And if you are a young kid and have something impoertant to tell, would you find enough confidence to start with the thing that matters? Smalltalk may kill coaching…

Giving Direct Answers

A leader must facilitate his/her employees. The key is to not give them answers but tools which they can use to find answers. If a coach continues giving away answers, his employees are going to depend on him till the end of their time in the company, which will only cram his work schedule.

Avoid defining solutions and invest in creating frameworks for solution-finding – which will work best in your favor as a coach.

A good riddle is something motivating and inspiring. Do not take it from people too early. Let them face the issues, maybe find out who they are, and maybe teach you a thing or two about innocence and passion.

 

These are some of the top coaching mistakes mentors and managers do.  As we have seen, it is not too difficult to correct them. Coaches just need to be cautious because managing people looks easy only on paper. In reality, they have to deal with different character types, work styles, and situations.