Mentor tools IV: Goals follow-up

Probably one of your purposes as a mentor is to make a follow-up of your mentees’ goals. Following-up goals is important because it allows your mentees to:

• reflect on their success
• learn from their failures
• consider any problems they meet along the way

But not only that. It will also enable you to:

• help them if they have any blockers or need any support
• keep track of their progress

So, the final aim of these follow-ups is to speed up your mentees’ professional development.

In this article I’ll give you some tips to lead your follow-ups and make the most of them. Keep reading!

First of all, I recommend agreeing on the periodicity of these sessions with your mentee. I normally do goal follow-ups once a month, but sometimes your mentees may need more or less frequency (although I would recommend having at least a monthly follow-up). Just ask them to find out their needs!

You can bring this topic in your first meeting to set a default periodicity and keep on asking at the end of every session to check if the needs have changed. And I always tell my mentees they can ping me if they need me before the next agreed date. I want to make sure they always can count on my support!

Once in your follow-up meeting, I firstly suggest checking if it is the right time to talk about goals progress. In my opinion, it is not always a good moment to talk about this topic.

Imagine that your mentee starts your conversation by telling you that they are facing a personal problem or a peak workload that is preventing them from working on their goals. At that point, my conversation will be firstly focused on helping my mentee to overcome this blocker or giving any kind of support if needed.

I will probably postpone our goal conversation to another moment. Or, if I’m not sure if my mentee wants to talk about it, I will ask: “Do you feel like talking about goals or do you prefer bringing up this topic in another meeting?”

So, in case it is the right time to bring up this topic, I normally follow these steps:

• Ask my mentee to open the tool where we track goals. If you don’t have one, you can open a shared doc with your mentee and collect in it all the information about goals. This will be your reference document from now on.

• Talk about each of the goals.
  The idea is to get an insight on:

  • How they feel about the progress on each of the goals
  • Detect blockers
  • Help to find possible solutions to blockers
  • Check if motivation and commitment are still there (even having blockers)
  • Decide if to continue working on each of the goals or to change any of them.

  To get all this information you can ask some of these questions:

  • Have you made progress on this goal?
  • How do you feel about your progress?
    • OK/proud:
      • Great, congrats!
      • What has helped you get this result?
    • Not OK/Not proud:
      • Why do you feel like that?
      • What has prevented you from making (more) progress? [The answer to this question is the blocker]
      • How can you…
        • … overcome [the blocker]?
        • … make progress despite [the blocker]?
      • Have you thought about…? (If you want to give an idea)
      • Do you need some help from me to unblock?
      • Are you still motivated and committed to this goal (although you have that blocker)?
      • Do you want to keep it or change it?

• Change any goal if necessary. Sometimes there are blockers that can’t be overcome, so the sooner the blocked goal is changed, the earlier our mentee can start working on something else. E.g. Your mentee’s goal was to take part in an internal project, but it is permanently blocked now. It seems necessary to move on to another goal. At this point, you can check some tips on how to set promotable goals in my previous article.

• Encourage your mentee to write down the conclusions of the conversations about the goals in your shared doc or in your company application. The idea is to write down if there was any progress on each of the goals, what was that progress, if there was any blocker and what solution was found or is still to be found. Maybe you think you could do that for your mentee but allowing them to do it will help them think calmly while writing, get their own conclusions and become more autonomous in their goal handling. I think this is a great opportunity to allow your mentees to develop their proactiveness and self-leadership!

• Set partial goals until the next meeting. This can be done by asking these questions:

  • What can you make progress on until our next meeting?
  • What could prevent you from making progress on that?
  • If you can’t make progress on that, what else can you work on?
  • Will you need any help from my side?

  After getting some action points, you can also encourage your mentee to write them down. It could be the starting point of the next follow-up session.

• Remember together the deadline for goal achievement. That will help them handle expectations about their own progress. For this purpose, you can ask: “How do you feel about the deadline of your goals?”

So now you know some tips on how you can keep track of your mentees' goals and progress. As a disclaimer, I must say that putting into practice these tips does not guarantee the success of your mentees achieving their goals, as there are factors that you can't control (e.g., some of your mentees' blockers or a lack of motivation on their side). Anyway, just by doing your best you’ll make a great difference!

Finally, if you have any other ideas for your goals follow-ups, you can leave them in comments!

See you in the next one!

Comments

[Íñigo Marquínez]

This was great and really useful! Speecially the list of questions related to the goals progress and encouraging the employee to write down the conclusions themselves to improve their autonomy!