Mentoring tools and exercises. Examples of techniques used in mentoring

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Mentoring is a process of sharing knowledge and experience, in which the Mentor helps the Mentee achieve their goals and develop their potential. However, an experienced and good Mentor does not rely only on loose talk, but uses a wide range of tools and exercises to help the Mentee learn about themselves, overcome challenges and achieve goals.

In this article, we will present some examples of tools and exercises that you can use in your mentoring practice. We will divide them into several categories, depending on their area.

Tools in the service of the goal of mentoring

Mentoring is a process in which an important element is the sharing of knowledge and experience, but equally important, and perhaps even more important, is guiding the Mentee to know themselves and work better on themselves. This is what mentoring tools and exercises help to do.

These techniques can be used in different situations and at different stages of the mentoring process. They can be used during mentoring sessions, as homework for the Mentee, or as part of self-development.

There are dozens of potential tools to use. In fact, a Mentor can use the whole range of techniques used in coaching, mentoring, training or in the daily work of a manager. However, to make it easier to implement into the world of these tools, we have divided them into several groups depending on their objectives:

• Definition of Mentee’s goals and priorities,
• give feedback, analyze and draw conclusions,
• Stimulating creativity, finding new solutions,
• Finding motivation for action,
• building self-awareness.

In the following section, we will provide examples of techniques from each field.

Catalog of mentoring and coaching tools

It is worth mentioning here that this article is only an introduction to the complete list of mentoring and coaching techniques and exercises that we have made available in the form of a catalog in Mentiway platform. There you will find dozens of different tools and exercises grouped into several application categories, searchable and downloadable as PDF files.

In addition, you will also find all of these tools with extensive descriptions in the Mentiway app. Mentors using the app can use these exercises on an ongoing basis during their metoring sessions.

Identify Mentee goals and priorities

This is the first stage of mentoring. It may seem that a Mentee participating in a mentoring program already has their goals and priorities defined. But very often this is not the case, and even if it is, these goals may be fuzzy and may need to be clarified. Setting and clarifying goals is the first stage of mentoring and the first opportunity to use dedicated techniques.

At this stage, we propose two techniques.

Goal setting – comprehensive version

This is a ready-made exercise that guides the Mentee step-by-step through defining, selecting and refining their own goals. The exercise provides some discipline in goal setting and places a strong emphasis on the metrics and benefits of each goal.

See the full description of techniques for setting development goals.

SMART

SMART is basically not an exercise, but a kind of methodology for defining your own goals. This applies to the mentoring process as well as to defining any development goal in general. SMART allows you to organize your goal definition and take care of its key aspects – such as measurability or achievability.

Building self-awareness

The broader area of building self-awareness is also related to the aforementioned topic of goal setting. In fact, the entire mentoring process should serve to help the Mentee get to know himself better. The following exercises, among others, will be useful for this:

Know your resources

This is a technique that promotes working on potentials. It serves to strengthen and motivate the person we are working with. It allows us to define areas of energizing and maintain a balance between what is positive and negative.

The wheel of life

The wheel of life and its variations – the wheel of work and the wheel of values – helps to visually assess the different areas of life and determine which are most important and which are less important.

Provide feedback, analysis and lessons learned

Analyzing the results of activities, drawing conclusions and giving feedback are the daily routine not only of every Mentor, but also of every manager, or more broadly of any employee who works in a team. Techniques related to these topics are plentiful, many of which should be familiar to any experienced employee. Techniques such as FUKO or Start Stop Continue are actually already standards in many companies.

Here I would like to share two examples of exercises that I personally found most interesting.

5xWhy

The first exercise is 5 x Why. This technique can be used both in pairs and alone. It applies to any situation in which we seek to discover the real reason for aspirations or behaviors. In a nutshell, it involves asking ourselves why questions starting with the first – the initial statement, through statements that are answers to the previous question. In this way, we get to the real crux of the issue, often quite different from the initial statement.

GOLD model

The second is the GOLD model – useful for evaluating the results of activities. It is interesting in that it places a strong emphasis on the learnings from the result and what the person subject to the exercise would do differently next time. It is worth keeping this model in mind every time we give feedback – especially in the case of performance we are not satisfied with.

Stimulate creativity, find new solutions

Alternative scenarios

This is a technique that helps in a stuck situation – stimulating creativity and making it easier to find many different solutions. It can be a good introduction to working on solving a specific problem.

Recognizing automatic thoughts in yourself

It’s basically an exercise about both broadening one’s perspective, but also giving insight into oneself, opening one’s eyes to what we think in different situations.

Automatic thoughts are thoughts that arise independently of us when we are confronted with various situations – usually difficult ones for us. Very often they are irrational thoughts that can limit us. The exercise helps you recognize these thoughts, notice them and deal with them in the future.

Motivation and action

Appreciative Approach Technique

This exercise helps motivate the Mentee to take action. It promotes acting on potentials, on what is positive. It consists of 5 steps starting from defining a topic or goal to planning specific steps for implementation. During the exercise, the Mentee identifies his or her resources and creates a target vision to eventually translate this into an action scenario.

Cartesian model of change

This is a very interesting exercise that is useful for decision-making, but also organizes thoughts and deepens self-awareness. In a nutshell, it involves determining the consequences of implementing or not implementing a chosen action and, as a result, gives you the opportunity to look at a given choice from many different perspectives.

Summary

Mentoring is an extremely effective tool for personal and professional development. To be an effective Mentor, one must have the right tools and skills and know how to use them. Supporting Mentees in achieving their goals is a demanding and time-consuming job, but at the same time extremely rewarding.

We hope this article has helped you understand what mentoring tools you can use in your work.

You’ll also find all the tools and techniques in the Mentiway app and can use them on the fly when implementing mentoring sessions.