Speaker 1: The fact remains that the mentor-mentee relationship is a mutually beneficial situation. Instead of focusing on what the mentor offers, reverse mentoring concentrates on what the mentee can teach the mentor.

Speaker 2: Welcome to the Contributor Wednesday series on the Bridge the Gap Network. This series is sponsored by Peak Senior Living by Functional Pathways. Each week, you'll hear from a thought leader discussing topics that are relevant and impactful to the senior living industry.

Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome back to Contributor Wednesday on the Bridge the Gap Podcast for Senior Living. I'm your host, Anthony Ormsby-Hale, Senior Vice President of Strategic Operations at Civitas Senior Living, and I'm thrilled to be a guest contributor with you all talking about the benefits of mentorship. So you and your mentee have met, you've started to get acquainted, and you've talked in pretty general terms about what you'll both accomplish during your mentoring relationship. Where do you go from here, and how do you accomplish your goals with the mentee? Mentoring activities are pre-planned engagement strategies that you can use with your mentee. The type of mentoring activity you choose is typically designed to help respond to one of many mentoring program goals. For example, if you're just getting to know your mentee for the first time, you may use an icebreaker activity that helps you and the mentee learn more about each other beyond the surface level and spur conversation. Whichever activity you choose to do, however, it's important that you follow the general policy of any learning engagement. Plan with the end in mind. A great way to begin your relationship with the mentee is to take them out for coffee or tea. Simple, I know, but it's a pretty effective practice. The focus of your first mentor meeting should be to establish a baseline for your relationship. Getting to know each other in a casual setting will help your mentee release some tension. And it's not uncommon for mentees to enter the relationship feeling stressed or anxious, especially if you're at more of a senior level within the organization. So why coffee or tea? Well, there's plenty of research out there that shows that caffeine does more than just give us energy. It can actually help relieve stress. Combined with a less formal environment, like a local coffee house or a tea shop, your mentee will feel far more comfortable with you and your mentoring relationship from the start. While I suggest that you do some goal planning during your first session, it may be a good idea to just spend time getting to know each other. You want to make sure that your first meeting is casual, focusing on informal discussion topics that build trust between the two of you. Depending on your history with the mentee, you can decide on the best course of action to take. Once you've established rapport and built trust with each other, you can move into the goal planning activities. In previous episodes, I've shared about strategic planning processes such as objectives and key results, and how you can document your plan on a professional development plan template. Every good mentoring relationship should have measurable goals, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you need to pull up a spreadsheet and start gathering hard data. Qualitatively measured goals are often just as important as those that can be measured with numbers, but you and your mentee will have a hard time tracking any kind of growth if you don't begin the mentoring relationship with a clear set of goals. And again, this goes back to that contracting part that I've mentioned in previous episodes, where there are clear expectations on both sides of what the outcomes of the relationship should be. There are multiple ways to establish goals, and one process that I haven't shared on this series is called the real goal method. And those are goals that are relevant, experimental, aspirational, and learning-based. Try to let your mentee lead the way in developing these goals. It may help if you give them some thinking questions to get started, and you may even suggest some yourself. Importantly, working together to create a timeline for each of these goals is critical. Just make sure you and the mentee are setting realistic timelines and goals for what's achievable within the timeframe of your mentoring relationship. As you move through the relationship with the mentee, you may discover that time management becomes an issue. While many mentors prefer to assign homework tasks, such as reading a book or completing an online course, these are pretty time-consuming tasks that may conflict with the mentee's current job duties. It's important for mentees to understand that a mentoring program requires commitment and organizations should allow for time within the mentee's workflow, but we all know that day-to-day tasks often push out long-term, more aspirational goals. Many mentees are looking for faster results, and one study reports that mentees often believe that their one-on-one meetings with their mentors are not very productive. As you go through your meetings, you may find that you need to help your mentee prepare for a high-stakes presentation or to have a challenging conversation with a direct report or a supervisor. One effective practice to use in this moment is role-playing. Role-playing is one of my most favorite coaching and mentoring tools, and I'm so excited to share this with you today. You'll find role-playing is a great way to help build your mentee's skills that they want to learn through the mentoring relationship. Role-playing is a long-established and well-researched practice that helps the learner step outside of themselves and helps the teacher get a better view of how the learner has progressed or where improvements may be needed. The biggest hurdle to role-playing can be the comfort level of the individual being asked to role-play. Try to keep the scenario simple and, as best you can, work within the comfort level of the individual. Ultimately, the goal of role-playing is to get someone out of their comfort zone. Role-playing is a social activity. Participants interact with the situations given, which can encourage them to work together to find solutions. Individuals can also analyze their own performances and provide tips or feedback for other participants. Here are some other benefits of role-playing training. It prepares participants for real-life situations. This activity allows employees to be in situations that they may encounter at work and get feedback on their performance. It indicates their current skill level. The facilitator of the session can analyze the employee's current skill level and highlight their strengths and weaknesses to help them improve their skills. And role-playing creates empathy. Employees can act in customer roles during role-playing training, which may allow them to better understand the other person's point of view and develop empathy for the situation or for the other person. There are five steps to facilitating a role-playing session. First, you want to identify an issue. Make sure that the participants clearly understand the problem you're trying to address and what you want to accomplish during the activity. Josh and Luke is here with an important update.

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Speaker 1: And now, back to the show. Describe the specific scenario. Consider using scenarios that participants might experience in their work, such as collaborating on a team with other employees or marketing a new product. Assign roles. Consider using scenarios that participants might experience in their work, such as leading a conversation or a team meeting or being a person who receives feedback. While understanding roles are important in the role-playing process, this is one where you can also flip and have each participant give feedback, whether you are working with the person or you've brought in someone else to help facilitate the role-playing session. Have participants act out the scenario. This is really important to make sure that, while it can be uncomfortable, that individuals are realistically playing into the scenario that we've all agreed on and that we're taking time to even sometimes establish a script or find some kind of outline of potential problems that may come up in the scenario. For example, if you're role-playing with an employee on how to overcome a customer who is upset with a service that has been provided, you may want to outline particular responses that a customer may give when trying to provide service recovery. And last but not least, you're going to want to provide feedback to the employee. One of the things that I personally love about role-playing sessions is that you can record the role-playing session and have the employee watch the recording and then provide feedback on what they've seen in addition to the feedback that you provide them. For individuals that perform better when they can recall past actions in similar situations, this is a great exercise to complete. Learning and development is an important component of any mentoring relationship. Two of my favorite methods of development activities for mentees include stretch assignments and job shadowing. Stretch assignments proactively provide and effectively manage the future of high potential employees. They're unique and challenging experiences that optimize on the job development. Over the last few years, this tactic has clearly been on the rise because stretch assignments provide the opportunity for individuals to be tested for creativity, innovation, judgment, and drive. Leaders may sometimes feel like they can't afford to provide stretch assignments to high-performing employees and they forget that they can't afford to lose these valuable employees either. Using stretch goals effectively can help to a number of gains and desired outcomes when they're right for both the company and for the mentee. Working with talent on stretch goals requires commitment, support, leadership, and flexibility. Here are a few guidelines to consider when using short-term stretch goals. Ensure that the immediate goals are part of a larger, more ambitious effort so that whatever is achieved and learned is a building block and not an end to itself. Intentionally design the short-term stretch goals in a way that force innovation, collaboration, and learning so it's not just a matter of working harder for a shorter period of time. Stretch assignments are intended to develop specific skills by providing the appropriate experience. Devising the right strategy to gain experience and build skills can be done using a variety of assignments such as having the individual manage an intern to build their management skills. If you have an individual who's interested in sales and marketing, you may ask them to develop content for a social media campaign and then report on the return on the investment. Or if you wanted to help an employee or a mentee improve their collaboration skills, you may ask them to join an inter-organizational task force such as your risk management team. When the global executive firm Egon Zender asked 823 international executives to look back at their careers and identified what helped them unleash their potential, the most popular answer cited by 71% of the participants was stretch assignments. By training, developing, monitoring, and witnessing the success of high performers, these people each become individually better and more valuable to the organization. The business will exhibit higher levels of success, a more engaged workforce, and the foundation for succession planning. When it comes to mentoring, the conventional view is that the top-down process in which the mentor is the expert and the mentee is the novice. The fact remains that the mentor-mentee relationship is a mutually beneficial situation. Instead of focusing on what the mentor offers, reverse mentoring concentrates on what the mentee can teach the mentor. For example, the mentee may be more technologically adept, having more recent formal training, and have a unique viewpoint as a younger professional or a member of a certain generation. One activity to consider is reverse job shadowing and having the mentor shadow the mentee. For the person who is being shadowed, they would get to demonstrate their hard-earned knowledge of processes, raising their own profile, and making a good impression. It would teach them how to communicate succinctly and how to influence and allow them to take pride in their work. For the person shadowing, they get a chance to view part of the business that they likely don't see in such detail, and it offers the senior leader an opportunity to learn emerging practices and new technologies. Last but not least, in a previous episode, I highlighted a role that some mentors play, which is called being a sponsor. In this role, the mentor or senior leader creates opportunities for advancement, for growth for the mentee. While not all mentors may be in a position to provide job opportunities for their mentee, they can help the individual expand their network. Helping your mentee expand their network is probably one of the most valuable things that you can do as a mentor. That's especially true for younger professionals. Around 35% of millennial and Gen Z workers who quit shortly after getting hired did so because their company didn't give them a clear pathway for career advancement. Part of that comes down to having access to a larger network and career pathing. Creating a networking event is a good way to send your mentee in the best way possible to establish their network. It puts them on the radar for other executives. It established relationships between them and potential future mentors. It allows them to put some of their newly acquired skills into practice. It can help boost confidence, and it helps them visualize a career pathway within the organization. There are some generational differences when it comes to networking, and it's important to understand that the concept of networking can feel challenging to younger workers who tend to avoid it altogether. By creating a networking event on their behalf or making the networking more suitable and casual, you can overcome many of those challenges. My hope is that these activities will prove useful to you as you're working with emerging leaders within your organization, whether it's job shadowing, role-playing, or just taking your mentee out to coffee and getting to know them a little bit better. These activities are designed to help you build trust and pursue results with your mentee. Thanks so much for taking the time to tune in today. I'm your host, Anthony Ormsby-Hale, and I encourage you to connect with me on LinkedIn so we can continue the conversation around developing emerging talent. Until next time, stay well, my friends.

Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to the Contributor Wednesday series on the Bridge the Gap Network, sponsored by Peak Senior Living by Functional Pathways. For a full library of episodes, visit btgvoice.com.