Mentoring can be a highly rewarding relationship for both parties, and corporate mentoring is an increasingly popular way for companies to help new or younger employees learn from successful practitioners.

Working with someone who’s “been there, done that” can help you navigate your career more easily (and recover from missteps more quickly), and vastly speed up your learning curve. But to realize the best of the benefits of mentoring or mentoring programs, it’s important to think through what you – and the company – hope to gain from the relationship, and what your responsibilities will be.

Establishing a Successful Mentoring Relationship
The following steps will help ensure that mentoring programs are positive experiences for both you and the person mentoring you.

• Determine what you hope to learn from your mentor. Although this will be part of the initial discussion you have with your mentor as you set goals together, it’s important for you to have thought about this issue and be prepared to offer suggestions. For example, people with disabilities sometimes seek out senior-level employees with disabilities who’ve had experience in the workplace to help them understand how to navigate disability-related issues. Others may consider a corporate mentoring program a great way to learn more about management best practices, how to lead a virtual team, or how to better handle interpersonal interactions.

• Ask your mentor what he or she feels would be important for the two of you to focus on.  If possible, it’s great to work with a mentor who has seen you work, and can make recommendations for areas you may want to work on in order to advance in the company or in your career. Solicit his or her advice, and then see how both of your ideas can be integrated into a mentoring program that helps you grow professionally.

• Determine a mentoring structure.  Will you meet together for coffee once a week? Should you come prepared with discussion questions, or would your mentor prefer to give you a question, have you work on it, and then discuss your answers? Is it okay to contact him or her for advice outside of your normal meeting times, or would this be considered intrusive (or taking up too much of your mentor’s time)? For how long with the mentoring program last? Sometimes a formal mentoring program ends up being a lifelong informal one, but this is up to the two of you to determine when you’d like to conclude (or how you’d like to continue) the mentoring relationship.

• Keep track of your successes, and let your mentor know about them.  The focus of a mentoring program is applied learning – that is, your mentor should be helping you learn how to do things in a more effective way. So when you apply those lessons or that advice, you want to let your mentor know you’re taking his or her counsel to heart, and becoming better at your job because of it.

• If there is no official corporate mentoring program, go unofficial.  Find someone who you respect, and who takes an interest in your success, and seek them out for counsel and advice – most likely, they will be happy to pass along the wisdom they have gained from others. Keep in mind, you are still responsible for the outcomes in your career, but reaching out to others for the wisdom they have won and the lessons they have learned is always a smart move. Just remember, what goes around really does come around, and there will probably come a day when you’ll be the one passing along that wisdom to a new or younger employee. No doubt you will do so with patience, understanding, and encouragement….

Good Mentoring Program s Can Help Jumpstart Your Career
Whether the mentoring is through an official “corporate mentoring” program or an unofficial “let’s meet regularly for coffee” arrangement, learning from someone more experienced than you is a smart way to move your career forward, faster. Especially for people with disabilities, who don’t always have the same sort of career confidence that others in the workplace take for granted, working with a mentor is an important pathway to career success and sustainability. Perhaps it’s time to find that person?

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