When you're set up for success, being a mentor can be a rewarding experience for you and your mentee. Miracle’s in-depth framework presented in this week’s Whiteboard Friday covers considerations like building trust, setting boundaries, and the qualities that make a great mentor.

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Hello. My name is Miracle Inameti-Archibong. Welcome to Whiteboard Friday. And today, I'm going to be taking you through a topic that's very close to my heart — how to become an effective mentor.

So today, I'm going to be taking you through how you can be an effective mentor and showing you that this is not something that is impossible for anyone to do because a mentor is just someone who you can sit down and share things with. A mentor is someone who motivates you, and a mentor is someone who equips you to grow.

And I think one of the things people struggle with as mentors is they feel they have to have all the answers. I find out, when I'm mentoring people, a lot of time people already know what they want to do. People have agency. They just need someone to support them through that agency, and they just need someone to believe in them.

And I think the goal of any mentoring session is to leave your mentee feeling like they can do things on their own. If you've ended a mentorship session and they still need you to solve the same problem, then it hasn't been successful. So it's not about you having all the answers. It's about you equipping somebody else to believe in their own solutions and keep doing it and just have that courage to grow. 

Objectivity

So what are the key qualities of a mentor? I think the first thing I always say to people is, "Thou shall not collude." I think when you're supporting someone, you want to be nice, and so you want to encourage them, and sometimes you can be overly, overly supportive in a sense that you don't give them the right feedback. You find it difficult to have conversations that call them out. As a mentor, you have to challenge what you're hearing. You have to support, but with objectivity. 

Listening

Another thing is listening. I love this definition of listening by Susan Howard, which is holding your self-expression in check. I really struggled with listening when I first started because I thought, "Oh, I'm a really good listener. I'm just yes, yes, yes. I'm listening to the person. I know exactly what to respond."

And when you realize that listening is not about responding, it's about actually hearing and understanding what the person is saying, it will give you a whole new meaning. And you'll realize that there's constantly a voice in your head analyzing what next to say when someone is talking, and so you have to practice listening, just keeping everything quiet, and then testing that understanding to say, because we all have bias, and we filter everything that we hear via the lens of what's happened to us in our past.

And so when you listen to someone, always stop and be like, "This is what I have understood, and I'm just checking that what exactly you were saying to me is exactly what I've understood, and that's why I'm saying it back to you." 

Self-awareness

The next thing is self-awareness. Now I've talked about bias, and it's very easy for you to collude with somebody if you're not self-aware of your own bias. Like everyone feels that they don't have bias, but we all have biases.

If you've been through your career and you've had a particularly bad boss that said exactly X, Y, Z to you, and you find yourself in that kind of mentoring situation where someone says, "Oh, this person did this to me," and you've been in a similar situation, chances are your first instinct will be to agree with them. But you need to be self-aware enough to challenge that understanding. I think one of the rules of thumb for me is, like, I always say, "Okay, let's look at the history. What happened before? What happened in your past job? Is this a pattern?" And try to examine what I'm hearing. Am I being overly supportive? Is this true? So always make sure you're testing your understanding.

And the key if you're not self-aware that these are blind spots that I have, and I'm not expecting everyone to go ahead and turn around and change their personality overnight. I don't believe that things like that happen. But the key to being self-aware is understanding that I have a blind spot in this. I have been given this feedback that I don't always see this. And so whenever I come into a new setting or a new conversation, I have to be aware that I have a tendency to do the X, Y, Z. So whenever I hear something, I need to test my understanding against all of these preset beliefs that I already have. Okay. 

Set boundaries

How to cultivate a successful mentoring relationship. I tell a story about when I did my counseling course like everyone was grown. We decided to set up a WhatsApp group. And the tutor said to us, it's like, "What are the rules for this group?" And we're like, "No, we're all grown-ups. It's going to be fine. Everyone knows how to behave."  

And at the end of each session, we have a group therapy. And then at the fifth group therapy session, she said, "Do you realize that you all spend at least 30 minutes talking about this WhatsApp group and how it's making everyone feel?" And we were like, "Oh, wow." And she was like, "This is because you set no boundaries." 

And so it's very easy because a lot of times, when we come into mentoring situations, it's someone we already know, someone we already like. And so you might just be like, "Oh, just go loosey-goosey. We're all grown-ups. We'll do it as it comes." But it is really, really key, if you take anything from this, is boundaries. You need to set boundaries because if you don't set boundaries, you can't tell when they've been broken. 

If you start a mentoring relationship and you allow someone free access all the time, and then you go three months down the lane and you're like, "Oh, I don't feel comfortable with this," that will break the trust because it will be like a betrayal of this relationship that we've built. So set your boundaries right from the beginning. 

And the first thing to think, "What's the duration of this?" A mentorship is not an unending relationship, because if you leave it as an unending relationship, it can feel like a burden. So the first thing to do is set the duration, set the time, set the mode of contact. I only want to be contacted via emails, Monday to Friday, X, Y, Z. I can only respond here. I don't want to be contacted via WhatsApp. You need to set those boundaries so that the mentorship that you are offering doesn't become a burden to you. 

Define outcomes

Next thing is define outcomes. Because a mentorship is a time, it's a duration thing, it doesn't go on forever, you need to make sure that you're defining your outcomes so that you can monitor progress. If not, if you don't set an outcome, how would you know if you've reached it? So make sure you set your goals. 

Be vulnerable

Next thing to do is vulnerability. Because it's a time-bound relationship, it's essential that you build trust. Being genuine is what brings out a vulnerability in us because we don't always want to show all the parts of ourselves. 

But if you're not doing that, you can't build trust because this is someone coming to you at a very vulnerable stage in their life. Vulnerability builds trust. We all seek to build connection. So if you give, you will get. 

Understand the ethics behind mentorship

And finally, this is a lot of responsibility, so you need to understand that there are ethics behind this. 

Conflict of interest, confidentiality is key, because, again, you need to build that trust and keep that trust. And for other people to feel safe approaching you, they need to ensure and they need to see that you have kept the confidence of somebody else. 

Power dynamics is another big one. You're in a situation of knowledge, and someone is coming to you at a very vulnerable time in their lives. 

Check that the power dynamics are right. Sometimes, especially in a professional setting, it might be that you've gone too high for a mentor, and you don't feel free to, like, speak about the things that are happening at work because that person is in a position of authority, making decisions. So make sure that you check, oh, I really want to help somebody, but my contract says I have a non-compete, and I can't really mentor someone in the same industry. 

So make sure that you're checking and you're keeping all of those things, you are respecting the ethics of this relationship. 

I will close with this quote by Maya Angelou. I love it so much. "When you get, give. When you learn, teach." Thank you.