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Sharpening your mentoring skills

Once the relationship is established, the mentor does several things.

1. Maintain trust. After trust is established, it must be maintained. This means being honest, open, and transparent. In addition, mentors should keep to the point, follow through with commitments, be available and flexible.

It also means appropriate confidentiality; private information stays private. It may take months for mentorees to open up, but it takes only a minute to shut them up with inappropriate sharing.

At the outset mentors and mentorees should discuss the kinds of information that would be appropriate to share (1) with anyone, (2) with other mentors, and (3) with each other only.

"Trust," says Don Payne, "grows out of humility. When a person does not presume to know what's in my head and is willing to hear me out, that engenders trust in me. I tend to hold at a distance people who seem to make prejudgments about what I need or what I need to hear." Attentive listening is the key.

In addition, mentors learn as well as teach. Mentoring relationships are not one-way, hierarchical relationships. While it's true that one has more experience than the other, the "life sharing" goes both ways. Thus, an additional responsibility of a mentor is to "accept the mentoree's influence." This too builds trust.

2. Have an agenda. At the top should be the mentoree's questions. But be flexible enough to recognize teachable moments. Jesus engaged his mentorees in hours of "debriefing" after healings and miracles and public debates. If mentors today send mentorees on risk-taking, faith-stretching, kingdom-building adventures, there will be plenty to talk about!

"When I was at Southern Gables Church," says Don Payne, "I mentored an incredibly bright seminary student. He had been an intelligence officer in the military before becoming a student, and 'openness' was very difficult for him. Life was tightly measured. Though he had the right theology of grace, he found it difficult to live by grace. The slightest mistake devastated him.

"We were reflecting on this one day, and I said, 'In ministry you will do stupid things, and the only response to doing stupid things is, "Hey, that was stupid. Now I know not to do that again." '

"For some reason that brief interchange was liberating for him. In God's providence, what is ordinary to one person can be pivotal to another."

3. Offer your network. Much of effective ministry is not what you know but who you know. If the mentoree asks, "Who knows something about this?" and you don't, then your assignment is "Who knows somebody who knows something about that?"

4. Offer perspective. By virtue of their extra years, mentors have something mentorees do not: experience. A mentor should therefore offer mentorees the gift of perspective.

A student once told Janet McCormack, chaplaincy training center director, "What I really like about you, Chaplain Janet, is that you focus on the purpose of ministry when I get lost in the details."

That's what mentors do—keep things focused on why we're doing what we do and who we're doing it for. "It is beneficial for many international students," says Terry Burns, missions training center director, "to simply hear, 'You're going through a lot of stuff right now.' It helps them understand that what they're going through is difficult. We provide perspective."