6 Ways You Can Mentor Your Employees

As a manager, you are often called upon to be in a mentoring role for your employees, but how do you identify your mentor role and fulfill it properly? As you mentor an employee, you will find yourself fulfilling one of 6 types of mentoring:

1. Relationship Mentoring

Managing interpersonal relationships is a challenge for just about everyone. As a manager, you will help employees through all sorts of relationship problems, dynamics, and growth. This dynamic requires you to have a knack for relationships, what makes people tick, conflict resolution, persuasion, influence, and other relationship factors so you can mentor the employee properly.

2. Informative Mentoring

Effectively mentoring an employee involves sharing information with him and teaching him how to properly handle information. In this aspect of mentoring, you will teach the employee how to value, process, and respond to information. It’s also important for the employee to learn how to keep some information confidential and how to ingest information from different people (i.e. information from boss versus coworker).

3. Facilitative Mentoring

A manager needs to discover the likes, beliefs, habits, and other personality factors of the employee to achieve facilitative mentoring. Facilitative mentoring helps an employee look at her situation, properly analyze it, and think outside of her beliefs for a resolution. Employees who are single minded and close minded often do not succeed, so your task as a mentor is to help facilitate new ideas for the employee.

4. Confrontive Mentoring

Some facilitating new ideas in mentoring doesn’t work and you have to result to confronting the employee. You are not a mentor if you do not have the ability to confront someone with facts. This does not suggest you should be aggressive with the mentee, but instead, be firm and challenge the employee. In a mentoring role, you do not order the employee around, but instead help direct him to the right path. Let him decide to walk down it.

5. Modeling and Mentoring

You are modeling behavior to your employees every day and if you’re mentoring them, it’s very important to ensure what you’re modeling is the behavior you want to see reproduced. As a mentor, your actions carry weight and if you’re constantly yelling at other people, you find members of your team will adopt this method of communication. In your role as a model, you must display and encourage behavior which will positively impact your team members.

6. Employee Vision Mentoring

Finally, your role as a mentor will include helping your employee with his career development. As an employee vision mentor, you will help your employee discover the career path that best fits his skills and desire. This is both an important role as a mentor, and a difficult one. If the career path is not on your team, you have to be cautious on how you mentor your employee.

Mentoring an employee is both challenging and rewarding.