Mentoring and Teamwork

“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success”-truly said by a renowned American industrialist. This in a simple layman’s language means “team work”. This word is so truly holds good in our lives personally and professionally.

Teamwork is a joint action by two or more people, in which each person contributes with different skills and express his or her individual interests and opinions to the unity and efficiency of the group in order to achieve common goals. This is so much important in today’s day to day work that right from the selection of a person till the time he /she is taken into the company ,one is also judged or assessed through ones team work. It’s no more one man’s show.Therefore the team members who cannot jell well with their teams are seen as a great threat to the team and the other team members.So, the team needs to be directed in a right way through a lot of activities that would keep them motivated to work in a team and in a better way. The direction can be shown by the team leader or the manager. The team lead or manager should be a person who has the capability to keep the team work unitedly and yet accomplish the goals set individually in order to perform well .Therefore the responsibility of a manager or a team lead increases.

During the times of down turn, the manager needs to motivate people to such an extent that one should not feel the heat of down turn at all. Mentoring to be so famous among the corporates is due to the work life one has and also for the timely, qualitative deliverables.

Therefore the mentor has a few roles to be played towards keeping his team’s goal alive and achieving them as planned.

The role of a mentor is.........

To build rapport: to be comfortable with the person to share your feelings, issues and also to find solutions. Basically, the one whom you feel approachable. Rapport can be built in a day, in a month or for that matter many years. Also there are cases where the rapport cannot be built at all.Therefore, the the person who takes the plunge to mentor a person shall be capable enough to break the ice between both and thus establish and rapport.

To Listen: the skill is very rarely seen in people, as all want them to be heard by the others .But the mentor has to be a good listener .Not only a good listner, but also while he /she is before their mentoree, one should keep a blank mind, not to be judgemental about the other person.Bieng non-judgemental helps to analyse the issues spoken out by the mentoree.The mind should be a blank board. The mentor should let the mentoree pour out his /her issues .This helps them to feel relived with their issues and find solutions by themselves.

To elicit the mentoree’s own wisdom: many of the times we think that solution is received only when one is proivded.But when the mentoree pour’s out to his/her mentor, the solution can be checked in the conversation itself. The mentoree will definitely be having some options in the mind to work on when the issue is creeped in.Its only that the mentoree needs an reason to get it out.The reason shloud be through the mentor.Therefore, if the mentoree is allowed to talk and pour out about himself, the options of solutions itself line up. Then the mentor can work around those options in discussion with the mentoree.

The mentor does not have to be older, wiser or have specialised knowledge in any field. They need to be skilled in leading a mentoring conversation. This would only come when the team would feel that the mentor is approachable. The mentor can as well work with his team together in terms of mentoring them. This is labelled as ‘group mentoring’. Here the mentor can be teamed with several mentorees who meet at the same time. A wonderful synergy can develop in this environment. As the mentor poses questions, listens and reflects he or she engages all members of the group into the conversation. Each one has their own experience and insight to share and can draw their own learning from the discussion. This would also help the mentor to keep up the team motivation and morale. Since the major causes for the teams no to perform is due to lack of recognition, motivation and morale.

Finally, though team work and team building can offer many challenges, the pay off from a high performance team is well worth it.



Regards,

Andrina.