Hit Your Career Goals with Your Mentor
It’s about the journey and not the destination, but clear goals act as lamp posts, ensuring your path to the destination is well-lit. Therefore, setting goals can make or break the path toward your destination. In a mentoring relationship, it holds the same importance.
Whether you are a mentor or mentee, setting goals will largely determine the extent to which you develop professionally and personally. In this blog, we shall try to understand the goals of mentoring, the various ways through which useful goals can be set, and how such goals can influence personal and professional growth.
Insights you'll gain from this blog:
Recent Blogs
What is the Purpose of Setting Goals in Mentoring?
Setting goals in mentoring relationships is vital for several reasons. On one hand, it promotes accountability and ensures that both the mentor and the mentee are focused and committed to the mentoring process. Clear goals also serve as an agenda, ensuring adaptation in the course and focus areas of the relationship. Besides, consistent goal tracking allows continuous improvement as it measures progress and provides an opportunity to celebrate small successes. Lastly, goal setting helps evaluate the mentoring program’s effectiveness.
Establishing goals brings benefits for both professional and personal growth. We’ll look into both:
The Role of Goal-Setting in Workplace Mentoring Programs
Workplace mentoring programs that use goals significantly enhance career development. For example, mentees who set and achieve goals are likely to be promoted to acquire problem-solving skills and tend to have higher job satisfaction. Employees in mentoring programs are 5 times more likely to get promoted than those without. Goal-setting programs are also likely to lead to better turnover, and mentors and mentees stay in their organization, feeling more engaged and appreciated.
As you develop in your career, so should your goals. Monitor and modify them to fit your present life circumstances and career direction. Gain feedback from your mentor and check whether you are on course with your goals. Reward yourself and celebrate each of the goals that you achieve to keep yourself on the right track and inspired.
Setting Goals that Strengthen Personal Growth
Balancing professional and personal growth results in holistic development in all walks of life. Goals can result in emotional intelligence and resilience and achieve work-life balance, among other things. The S.M.A.R.T. framework can help define personal development goals clearly, which can be reviewed and modified from time to time.
Now that we have set the goals and understood their pros in professional and personal development, the structure can look at establishing mentoring goals.
Setting Mentoring Goals: Choosing the Right Frameworks
Selecting the right framework for setting these goals can make them more effective. Some of the right frameworks to be considered would include the following:
Objectives and Key Results (O.K.R.s):
Related Blogs
MENTORING 
JUNE 10, 2024
I have always been a huge believer in the inestimable value good mentoring can contribute to any nascent business.
MENTORING JUNE 10, 2024
In the simplest terms, mentoring is a one-to-one relationship between an experienced (mentor) and less experienced (mentee) people.
MENTORING JUNE 10, 2024
In the journey of personal and professional growth, mentorship stands as a guiding light, illuminating the path with wisdom and experience.
The O.K.R. technique sets a general objective followed by specific, measurable key results. For example, if the mentee’s objective is to advance her career from a current role to a senior one, some key results could include obtaining a certain professional certification, shadowing a senior colleague, engaging with the industry, and actively participating in various networking events.
The mentor and the mentee hold hands to help identify one of the broader objectives and then develop the specific, measurable key results to accomplish that objective.
Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound (SMART) Goals:
This is one of the best practice implements that has been largely adopted and is more actualized in mentoring. We’ll try to understand this with an example. Imagine Marie wants to get promoted from Specialist to Senior Specialist this year, so she and her mentor would work towards setting goals like investing at least 10 hours shadowing a senior colleague, acquiring one certification of your professional organization, and spending 2 hours each week growing on her career goal.
Micro-Goals:
This involves breaking the goal into smaller goals with specific results, making this approach easier to manage. For instance, instead of shadowing 10 hours with the senior in one stretch, the micro-goal approach would plan for ten one-hour sessions over ten weeks and mark progress after each session.
Tips for Setting Effective Mentoring Goals
These are, therefore, the tips to ensure your mentee has effective mentoring goals.
1) Encourage Ownership
Allow the mentee to own the process of setting goals for investment and motivation.
2) Set Challenging Yet Achievable Goals
Push the mentee without the frustration that their goals are unrealistic to meet.
3) An Action Plan
The steps to achieve each goal, plus the required resources.
Subscribe to the IMC Newsletter
Get the latest information about Mentoring and updates about IMC through our newsletter
4) Regular Check-In
It helps to talk regularly about the progress to ensure clarity and keep both parties on track.
5) Provide Support
Provide guidance and feedback as they go through the process.
6) Celebrate Success
Acknowledge and celebrate achievement as mentees learn to set and achieve goals.
The Bottom Line
Good mentors will strive to work at core mentoring principles and persist in the belief that their impact will eventually result in real change. You also have to remember that some effects won’t be realized within the life of the assignment, and some may not even be directly cause-and-effect with the sessions. Indeed, mentoring often has long-term or untraceable effects that are not visible in the short term or even measurable.
Mentors who stick with it and find it enjoyable receive significant personal and professional growth, even if the benefits become evident only over time. Can you think back to a time when mentoring helped you? Let us know.
Are you looking forward to becoming a mentor and know more about mentoring?
Read more about our mentoring here.
Recent Blogs
Related Blogs
MENTORING JUNE 10, 2024
I have always been a huge believer in the inestimable value good mentoring can contribute to any nascent business.
MENTORING JUNE 10, 2024
In the simplest terms, mentoring is a one-to-one relationship between an experienced (mentor) and less experienced (mentee) people.
MENTORING JUNE 10, 2024
In the journey of personal and professional growth, mentorship stands as a guiding light, illuminating the path with wisdom and experience.
Subscribe to the IMC Newsletter
Get the latest information about Mentoring and updates about IMC through our newsletter