The Mentoring Project: 6 Key Learnings from Helping Others
Syed is an experienced project manager with more than 14 years of ICT experience, successfully delivering high-value key projects across all domains of ICT services.
In the last two years, I have been volunteering with various non-profit organizations, an activity that is done in my free time (mostly on weekends). As a career accelerator mentor, I help my mentees identify and achieve a goal.
I was very satisfied with my first mentoring program, and I was super excited to participate again with the same organization. I gradually moved on to work with some other organizations, but the overall pattern and objectives of the program were almost the same.
In this article, I will highlight some of my key learnings—and I will try to relate them to the journey of project management.
1. Start with the objective: Just like any project, every mentoring program starts with an objective in mind—to help the mentee and make better use of everyone’s time. In orientation sessions, program objectives are communicated in a crystal-clear way to all participants. The importance of session working agreements, culture, code of conduct, and key challenges are discussed and communicated.
The project management connection: This is like the session we conduct before initiating a project—we try to understand the business challenges and realign our project objectives so that we remain focused on our resolve to provide the right solution.
2. Identify your goal: In our first meeting, we emphasize the importance of identifying …
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