Are You Ready?

A mentoring relation ship is not something to take lightly. Many people see the advantages of a mentoring relationship, but they aren’t fully prepared to take advantage of it. Below are some things that will help you decide if you are prepared to be either a mentee or a mentor:

For the Mentee

• Are you prepared to take an active role in developing yourself as a writer, speaker or whatever area of development you have?
• Do you know what you hope to gain from the mentoring relationship?
• Do you know what is preventing you from reaching your goals?
• Are you willing to develop your interpersonal skills?
• Have you considered what it is that your mentor can do to help you?
• Are you willing to listen with an open mind to suggestions your mentor makes? Are you willing to try the suggestions before dismissing them?
• Do you have time to spend improving and working with your mentor?

For the Mentor

• Do you have an interest in the success of your mentee?
• Are you willing to use your contacts in the industry to help your mentee?
• Do you have time for this?
• Are you looking for ways to be a better mentor?
• Are you willing to develop your interpersonal skills?

Personality Tests

At some point in your life, you have probably taken a personality test of some point. Schools often give personality tests to help their students decide what they want to do with their lives. Churches will sometimes give personality tests to assess a person’s spiritual gifts. Businesses will give personality tests to help access how to utilize the skill sets they have available. You have probably heard of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which classifies each person into 16 personality types based on their preferences.

Personality tests can be useful in a mentoring situation. No personality test is completely accurate, but they can be a good starting point from which a mentor and mentee can get to know more about each other. Personality tests can also help to identify areas the mentee needs to work on. The demands of the writing career make it such that the extravert tends to succeed where the introvert does not. The judging personality may have advantages and disadvantages that the perceiving personality does not. Using his or her knowledge of the mentee’s personality, the mentor can then help to identify traits that the mentee can take advantage of as well as identify traits they he must work to overcome.

What Mentoring Isn’t

Some people go into a mentoring relationship with unrealistic expectations of what it should be. The following is a list of things that mentoring isn’t:

• A Guarantee for a Book Contract
• A Relationship that Lasts Forever
• A substitute for reading books and/or attending conferences to learn how to write, submit queries, market books etc.
• A way to get someone to edit your work for you.
• A method of getting a good ideas that agents and publishers will jump on.
• A substitute for building a platform.

Benefits of Being a Mentor

Why would I want to mentor someone? I have enough trouble selling books (editing books, writing books) without giving all my secrets away from free. Here are some reasons to consider mentoring:

• Broader understanding of the publishing industry and writing community, obtained by seeing it through the eyes of someone less entrenched.
• More readers, achieved by increasing the quality of books and the genre in general.
• A better understanding of diverse backgrounds, providing a better understanding of readers.
• Satisfaction from helping someone else.
• Improved self-awareness.
• Improved ability to order thoughts and to transfer knowledge.

Benefits of Mentoring for the Mentee

Why would I want a mentor? Here are some of the potential benefits for writers and aspiring writers:

• Increased Awareness of the activities of the publishing industry and the writing community.
• Increased Knowledge of what works and what doesn’t in writing, marketing and platform building.
• Improved Effectiveness
• Opportunity to develop skills, such as writing, querying, public speaking, interviews and connecting with fans.
• Impartial “Sounding Board”
• Motivation and Confidence

An Example Agreement

In a formal mentoring arrangement, it is best to have some kind of written agreement. This helps to assure that both parties understand what they are getting out of the arrangement and what will be required of them. The last thing a published author needs is a wannabe author thinking that the published author will convince his publisher to offer the wannabe a contract. And the last thing an aspiring author needs is a lawsuit from a published author saying the aspiring author stole his intellectual property. You might watch Finding Forester again to see some of the benefits and problems of mentoring within the author community. How formal you go is up to you, but the following will give you some idea of what you might want to put in a formal agreement:

Example Agreement

We, the mentor and mentee have mutually developed this agreement to lay down the ground rules of how our mentoring relationship should work.

We are both committing to do our best to honor these ground rules. We will both try to:

• E-mail at least once per ____________, for at least _____________ (amount of time)
• Deal with any problems we might have by talking about it—even when it isn’t easy. We will face our problems and things that don’t feel right, rather than not dealing with it.
• Keep the other person apprised of times when we will not be available, via an e-mail message.
• Honor the other person’s privacy. We will ask the mentor/mentee before passing on any information that person has given us. The only exception to this is that it does not excuse us from doing our duty to report illegal actions that come to our knowledge or dangerous situations. Nor does it prevent the mentee from asking advice from others when he/she feels unsafe.
• Work toward our shared goals. These include (list below):
• Recognize that we are not the same people. We will respect and value each other for the ways we are alike and the ways we are different, recognizing that while we may not at agree on all things, we can learn from our differences and the path by which we came to those differences.
• Listen. We will try to understand the other person’s viewpoint.
• Take responsibility for making sure that we get things done, but also have fun doing it.

Additionally, we understand that:

• Any story ideas, wording, intellectual property, etc. should not be used in our own work without express permission.
• If one person’s idea or wording does happen to show up in the other person’s work without permission, we will handle the situation between the two of us, rather than involving other people and lawyers.

____________________

Mentee Signature

____________________

Mentor Signature

An Atmosphere of Friendship

It is in the best interest of both parties to be able to trust the other person as a friend, but if some issue does come up, such as one of the mentee’s ideas appearing in the mentor’s next book, it is better to keep it between the two of them. Court cases are costly and the the lawyers seem to be the only people who make money. Besides, in the future, potential mentors are likely to turn down requests from someone sued a previous mentor. There are situations where the situation may require more drastic action, such as if a mentor were to take advantage and abuse a mentee, but if at all possible, it is best to bow out of the conflict in other situations. Of course, the best thing to do is to pick a mentor/mentee that isn’t going to create such a problem in the first place. Also, if you don’t want an idea shared, it might be better to not mention it at all. It is easy to latch onto an idea and forget where it came from. We may not intend to use another person’s idea, but things happen. Look for a mentor/mentee you can trust and don’t burden him/her with keeping any secrets if it is not necessary for reaching your goals. Try to create and Atmosphere of Friendship.

What Should Happen When We Meet?

At its heart the mentoring relationship is about two friends coming together to talk about how the less experienced can gain from the experience of the other. How friends interact with each other is as varied as the friendships themselves. How you meet in a mentoring relationship is up to you. Do what works best for both people.

I was in a formal mentoring relationship set up by my employer. My mentor was a senior manager, so he had managers working for him who had other people working for them. The first time I interviewed him over the phone. I remember him cutting that conversation short, “There’s people in my office. Something must have broke.” Later, when we planned how we should meet, he told me that it would work best for him if we met away from the office because, if he were there for people to find, people would interrupt our meetings. We met for an hour each month at some of the local restaurants and discussed such things as setting objectives and wording for what should be on a performance appraisal.

The first time we had lunch together, really didn’t know how we would handle the bill. It is always somewhat messy when a ticket has to be split. I wondered if I should pay it, since I was taking advantage of his time. He made it easy for me. “I’ll pay this time and you can pay next time.” Here again, you do what works best in your situation, but I think it is best if both people pay their own way. It is best if the mentor be one to express how he would like for it to be handled.

The meeting itself can include some amount of small talk and probably should. It is easier to communicate if we know something of what is going on in the other person’s life. But mentoring sessions should not degrade into nothing but chitchat. Whether you are the mentor or the mentee, it is your responsibility to make sure that the primary conversation during these meetings is about what the mentee needs to be doing to reach the goals that have been defined. There should be some discussion of what the mentee has done since the last meeting. There should also be discussion of what the mentee should do between now and the next meeting. These meetings are also a good place to discuss things that may be coming up later and any goals that may need to change due to the current situation.

Mentoring meetings should happen at regular intervals, though they don’t have to fall on the same day each month, fortnight or week, as the case may be. Before the mentoring session ends, a time for the next meeting should be discussed. If a decision can’t be made as to time at that point, there should at least be a plan for setting that time in the near future. For example, one of the two might say that he will email the other when he finds out when his wife is off work.

Who Runs the Show?

The mentor deserves respect, but the mentee sets the agenda. This isn’t a teacher/student relationship. In the teacher/student relationship, the teacher decides what the student needs to learn and tries to deposit that knowledge in the student’s brain in some way. That relationship is necessary and important, but it has its problems. In the mentor/mentee relationship, the mentee decides what he wants to learn and asks the mentor for assistance in doing so. There are some distinct advantages to this.

One advantage is that the mentor doesn’t have to decide what the mentee needs to know. The mentee comes to him and asks. “How would you handle this situation?”

Another advantage is that the mentee is more open to learning. He isn’t sitting in class telling himself he needs to learn this boring stuff because it will be on the test. Instead, he recognizes the importance of the information he is receiving because he has probably run into a situation where he could use it, causing him to ask for it.

Each time they meet, the mentee is asking the mentor questions. The mentor has the option and is even obligated to make suggestions on what questions the mentee should be asking at this point, but if the mentee doesn’t see the value in it, the mentor shouldn’t try to force it on him. The mentee initiates the relationship. The mentee sets the agenda for their meetings. The task of the mentor is to address the questions of the mentee, if he can.

A Mentor Isn't a Fairy Godmother

When entering into a mentoring relationship, whether as a mentor or a mentee, it is essential to establish a clear understanding of what will take place. If you happen to be a bestselling author, it is best that you don’t attempt mentoring a wannabe author unless you are already a close personal friend of the author. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that, since you may have your fair share of people trying to send you manuscripts to look at and such. Here’s the problem. A wannabe author will go into the mentoring relationship with the expectation that the bestselling author can wave her magic wand and solve all of her problems. Short of that, the wannabe author may want the author to edit her manuscript. The bestselling author may want the wannabe author to make changes that the wannabe is unwilling to make.

If you want to read your mentee’s manuscript and make suggestions, that is up to you, but that is not the point of a mentor/mentee relationship. Going into the relationship, the mentee should establish some goals for what he wants to accomplish during the period of the relationship. Each month, or each fortnight, the mentor should discuss with the mentee what the mentee has done to move toward those goals and make suggestions on what the mentee should do during the next month or fortnight that will help move him toward those goals.

Let’s say the mentor is a bestselling author and the mentee is a published author who has just gotten the largest contract she has ever seen. She doesn’t need someone to tell her how to write. What she needs is someone to help her through this mess of finishing the book, while meeting the increased expectations of the publisher that she will do marketing and any number of other things. The mentor can sit down with her in that situation and talk to her about avoiding the mistakes she made in the same situation. But going into that situation, both need to be clear that that is the purpose of the mentoring relationship and not something else.

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