mentor-protégé program

A GOOD MENTOR: -- Communicates regularly. -- Is direct and honest. -- Accepts people where they are and goes from there!

ABOUT MENTORING: What’s exciting about the possibility mentoring presents is that it continually demands from you the commitment to perform beyond the levels you’ve reached in the past. It demands the willingness to treat each situation as brand new and to treat people with compassion. Above all, being a great mentor demands that you be mentor-able yourself. Your mentor could be anyone, and to the extent that you let people mentor you, your own mentoring will be empowered.

BEING A GREAT MENTOR: -- Mentoring is the art of putting yourself in the other person’s shoes; imagining yourself in the situation, and asking yourself what your interpretation would be. -- Mentoring means being straight with people and accepting people as they are. -- A good mentor relates to people as the people they can be, not as the mistakes they made in the past. -- Good mentoring practices will provide an example for others and set the tone for better communication in the workplace. Keep your mind open to new suggestions and give your employees room and encouragement to participate more fully, and productivity as well as morale will be changed.

PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT STRATEGY -- MENTORING: In order for the performance management system to be effective as a mentoring tool, people must feel that they are being understood and valued. If people feel that their personal worth is being called into question, they will not speak freely or seek ways to improve; instead, they will concentrate on defending their behavior and job performance.

TOWARD EFFECTIVE MENTORING: There are three things you can do to have a solid, productive work force. 1) Hire only fully competent people who already know the job and who do things right all the time. There aren’t many such people but you could look around and keep on searching. -- 2) Wish for a miracle. -- 3) Take the employees you have and train them to be highly competent. Of these three choices, doing a good job of training and mentoring is the most practical way to have successful and productive employees. Training is teaching employees the necessary skills before they are given the job to do on their own. Mentoring is helping employees day-by-day to do a better job. It’s making them more able to do their present job on their own and to enjoy doing it well. It’s also preparing them for bigger future responsibilities. Good mentoring is motivating people to want to do the best they can and more.

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