Mentor tools VII - Set up goals

Is it time to help your mentee set up their goals for the year and you don't quite know how to do it?

Or maybe you need a guide to set up your own goals?

Setting goals may seem like a simple task, but how many times have you failed to achieve your goals? How many times has a mentee set a goal at the beginning of the year and by the end of the year it was half done or not even started?

To increase the chances of achieving your goals, it is essential to choose them and formulate them well. I usually hold a specific meeting (or even two) with my mentees for this purpose. I listen carefully to their ideas but, above all, I ask a lot of questions to help them clarify and make their own decisions.

Do you want to know how I approach the meeting in which my mentees set their goals? Read on!

Step 1: Ask, ask, ask

Choosing goals is a very personal decision. Maybe it has happened to you that someone has said "Hey, why don't you do this?" and you, even knowing that it was in some sense positive for you, have not found the motivation to do it or have not given it enough priority.

The reason this happens is that we each have our own abilities, limitations, motivations, priorities... so it is very difficult for someone else to propose something to you that connects and fits with all of this. But there is someone who can hit the nail on the head: YOU.

However, we sometimes do not have very clear ideas because we have not stopped enough to know ourselves and discover what moves us, what we like, what our priorities are... this can happen to our mentees and this is where our work as mentors comes in.

To help your mentee to define their goals, the best thing you can do is to ask questions.

These questions will make them reflect and, with the conclusions obtained, they will be able to choose and formulate goals for which it will be easier to find motivation.

This doesn't mean that you can't give your opinion or suggestions at some point in the conversation, specially if it is your mentee who asks you about them. But, in my experience, your questions and your active listening will be more valuable, at least in this initial phase of goal setting.

Furthermore, think about the goals that your previous mentees have accomplished and which ones have not. Have they been the ones they proposed themselves? Or the ones you proposed to them? Perhaps the ones with a mixture of their ideas and your contributions? I invite you to this reflection.

In any case, if you have always been more about proposing ideas than asking and listening, I challenge you to change the dynamic. Ask and listen more than you talk. At first it will be strange, you will feel that you are too quiet or that you contribute too little. But give yourself time, observe the results, and draw your own conclusions.

At this point you may be thinking, but what exactly do I ask my mentee?

Well, in this section I am going to give you a list of questions you can ask. But first, I will give you some advice.

The first one is that you don't have to ask all the questions and not in a specific order. You will be the one who, as the conversation flows, will select them with your magical intuition as a mentor and the practice you acquire.

The second is that before the meeting with your mentee, you practice reading the questions and answering them yourself to refine any of your goals. You will then be able to adapt the questions to the way you speak so that you feel more comfortable. Or you may want to change the order, add or delete some questions... I encourage you to make this questionnaire your own.

That said, let's get to the questions list:

• Initial questions: Are you clear about what goals you want to set?

  • Yes: listen to their ideas and go directly to Block 1. Go through all the following blocks of questions for each one. The idea is to refine them one by one.

  • No: ask some of the following brainstorming questions before moving on to the next block:

    • How do you see yourself professionally in (1/2/5) years?
    • What will you have learned that you don't know now?
    • What hard/soft skills will you have that you don't have now?
    • What challenges will you have faced?
    • What responsibilities will you have?
    • What do you need to do to get there?
    • Where would you like to start?

    From these questions will come ideas for possible goals. Go now to Block 1 and talk about each goal independently to get them refined.

• Block 1: Alignment with their motivations:

  • What do you want to achieve this goal for?
  • What will be the reward for you?

• Block 2: alignment with the needs of the company:

  • Will you be able to bring value to the company by doing this objective?

    • Yes: Great!
    • No:
      • Is there any way to reformulate it so that it brings (more) value?
      • Do you want to keep this goal even though it does not seem to bring (enough) value to the company?

    In case your mentee wants to keep a goal even though it does not bring (enough) value to the company (maybe it does bring value to themself and that is enough for them), I recommend you to warn them that, the more aligned their goals are with the company's needs, the more likely they will be compensated. You can read more about promotable goals here.

    In case they don’t want to keep that goal you will discard it and take another idea from their list of possible goals. Ideally, start the questions again from the beginning of Block 1 to refine the new goal. This can happen throughout the entire questionnaire and, in fact, it is not a bad thing to discard goals, as it will mean that you are refining them well.

• Block 3: define SMART objective. A SMART goal has the following characteristics: it is SPECIFIC, MEASURABLE, AMBITIOUS*, REALISTIC and TIME-BOUND.

  Thanks to these characteristics the goal has more chances to be fulfilled. Therefore, we are going to ask some questions to "transform" it because, surely, the goal as you have set it up to now does not have these characteristics.

  • Specific:
    • What exactly do you want to achieve (e.g. if your proposal is "improve my soft skills", it is about you reflecting on what exactly you want to improve until the objective is specific enough, e.g. "Learn to set boundaries and manage customer expectations assertively").
    • What is it for you to... (e.g. if they tell you they want to "write better code" you can ask "What is it for you to write better code?" so that they become more aware of what they want to work on specifically).
  • Measurable:
    • How will you know that you are making progress on your goal?
    • How will you know that you have achieved it?
  • Ambitious*:
    • Is it a challenge for you?
    • (If not) How could it become a challenge?
  • Realistic:
    • To what extent is it up to you?
    • What options for success do you see from 0 to 10?
    • If the chances of success you see are low:
      • How could you redefine it to increase the chances of success?
      • Do you want to keep refining this goal despite the low chances of success?
    • What resources do you need to achieve it (e.g. time, help from others, training, budget...)?
    • How can you get the resources you lack?
    • What could prevent you from achieving it?
  • Time-bound:
    • When do you want to start working on it?
    • When do you want to have it completed?
    • What intermediate stages might there be?

• Block 4: check commitment

  • What level of commitment do you have to this goal from 0 to 10?
  • If your answer is less than 9:
    • Is there any way to adapt the goal so that your commitment reaches 9?
    • Do you want to choose this goal in spite of it?

And that’s all from the questioning phase.

At this point your mentee will have a good idea about the goals they want to choose. You will also have tested and refined them with questions to increase the chances of success.

You already have 90% of the work done! You can move on to the next step.

Step 2: Write down the goals

Now all that's left to do is to write down these goals. It is likely in your company you have a tool or space where these goals can be collected.

I recommend that you encourage your mentee to access this space and write them down themself. This way you will foster their autonomy and, besides, who better than them to explain what they want to do and how they are going to do it?

To ensure that the objectives are well written, I suggest you fill in this template for each of them:

Title of the objective

• I want to... (general objective)
• That will have an impact on... (describe personal & company impact)
• For that I am going to... (milestones)
• I am going to need...
• I want to finish it by (deadline)

And that’s it!

I hope you find these tips useful and see you in the next article.

Note: In some sources, the A from SMART goals can also mean “attainable” or “achievable”.