Mentoring can be “life changing”, as a mentoring participant recently told me when explaining how much she valued mentoring. She said that she used to get frustrated that her mentor didn’t answer her questions. Instead, he asked her questions! Now she realizes how empowering it is when his probing draws her out. That’s not to say that the mentor should never give advice. In fact, one of her big learnings has come from his often repeated wisdom: “Choose which hill you’ll die on”, meaning, decide when to speak up and fight for something and when not to.
Great mentoring is finding the right ratio of asking to telling. I advocate a general principle of 80:20. What do you think?
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