Mentoring can bring a lot of extra value to the relationship you have with your team, and improve work satisfaction for all involved.
Many successful athletes, entrepreneurs, billionaires, authors, and leaders credit their success to a mentor who was able to develop their potential. If you had a mentor in your younger days, you’ll know how powerful it can be.
It’s also a fantastic way to share your wealth of knowledge and experience and pass the baton, so to speak. Mentoring your team can be incredibly rewarding and refilling for mentor and mentee alike, so here are some pointers to help you get started.
Why mentoring is an investment
Mentoring is about connecting to someone with a deeper purpose – it’s more than just a fellow team member working towards a professional outcome. The mentoring process provides an awesome opportunity to push people through an experience that grows confidence, trains, and instils values in an employee, which in turn benefits the entire practice.
As a mentor, you share years of knowledge, skills, and information in order to transform the mentee. But you also have the opportunity to learn from your mentee, who can provide valuable insight and give you a perspective into practice life that you might not otherwise see.
Whilst it does require a certain amount of time and energy, it’s a win for the individual, the practice, and for you.
Different types of mentoring
Individual mentoring is probably the one that first comes to mind; you have an older and more experienced individual working directly with a novice to build them both personally and professionally. Not only is there education and knowledge being transferred, but there may be a strong role model or trusted advisor dynamic.
It’s also possible to mentor a small group of individuals, and focus on a specific outcome or common goal. It’s slightly different to leading a team, in that ideally there would be fewer people and the role would be less authority and more advisory. This dynamic is common in community or church groups, where you might have a small group of people and an experienced mentor guiding them to a common outcome.
The difference between mentoring and coaching
Though these two concepts seem awfully similar, there are a few distinct differences.
Typically, a mentor is someone who has greater skills, success, and knowledge in the given field to impart on their mentee. They are more experienced than the mentee and are looking for direct outcomes in growth – almost as if they’re wanting the mentee to follow in their footsteps.
A coach, on the other hand, doesn’t necessarily have to have the same or superior skills and qualifications to the mentee. For example, a dental coach doesn’t necessarily have to be a technically better dentist than their clients, it’s more about the ability to develop and implement processes that enable clients to be successful in their own right.
An effective mentoring session
Celebration and encouragement are absolutely crucial – we set goals and work to the bone to achieve them, so that acknowledgment and joy is well deserved.
It’s also natural to encounter uncomfortable emotions like frustration, disappointment, and defeat, but being resilient and able to persist through these states is really the only way to achieve success in mentoring.
When you have that established connection around purpose, a common goal, and a great level of trust, you’re better able to support your mentee through discomfort and build the resilience muscle.
Overall, the quality of the mentoring experience is directly correlated to the amount of preparation and structure that goes into the process. Our Practice Max and Savvy Dentist Academy members are able to access templates and resources for structured mentoring sessions, including how to approach and engage mentees.
If you would like to find out more about Practice Max or the Savvy Dentist Academy, please give us a call at:1300 66 83 84
P.S. Whenever you’re ready …. here are 4 ways I can help you grow your dental practice:
1. Grab a free chapter from my book “Retention – How to Plug the #1 Profit Leak in Your Dental Practice”
The book is the definitive guide to patient retention and how to use internal marketing to grow your practice – Click Here
2. Join the Savvy Dentist community and connect with dentists who are scaling their practice too
It’s our Facebook group where clever dentists learn to become commercially smart so that they have more patients, more profit and less stress. – Click Here
3. Attend a Practice Max Intensive live event
Our 2 day immersive events provide access to the latest entrepreneurial thinking and actionable strategies to drive your practice forward. You’ll leave with a game plan to take your results to the next level. If you’d like to join us, just send me a message with the word “Event and I’ll get you all the details! – Click here
4. Work with me and my team privately
If you’d like to work directly with me and my team to take your profit from 6 figures to 7 figures …. just send me a message with the word “Private”… tell me a little about your practice and what you would like to work on together, and I’ll get you all the details! – Click here
