9 Mentoring Skills Inventory

This inventory can be used to conduct a personal assessment for mentors. The 12 mentoring skills in the following inventory are some core mentoring skills. The purpose of this assessment is to gauge your comfort with each skill and identify what skills you need to improve upon. Rank your comfort level/abilities on a scale of 1 to 5 with 1 being uncomfortable and 5 being very comfortable.

1. Building and maintaining relationships: patience and persistence in developing meaningful relationships
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   • 2
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   • 5
2. Communicating: open communication, listening effectively, communicating clearly and unambiguously, recognizing nonverbal cues
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   • 5
3. Coaching: helping an individual learn and refine new skills
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   • 5
4. Encouraging: cheerleading, confidence building, motivating, inspiring
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   • 5
5. Facilitating: promoting and enabling self-directed learning
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   • 5
6. Goal setting: setting specific, realistic, and quantifiable goals
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   • 5
7. Guiding: help maintain focus and set boundaries
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   • 5
8. Brokering relationships: making the right contacts and laying the groundwork for protégés to connect with other people who can be resources to them
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   • 5
9. Managing conflict: inviting conversation about differing points of view
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   • 5
10. Problem solving: providing assistance in the problem-solving process, not solving problems for protégé
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    • 5
11. Providing and receiving feedback: challenging, providing constructive feedback
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    • 5
12. Reflecting: ability to step back, evaluate, process and consider the implications for future action
    • 1
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    • 4
    • 5

adapted from

• “Faculty Mentoring Toolkit: A Resource for Faculty, Mentors and Administrators” by Luz, C.C. (Ed.), Michigan State University (NSF ADVANCE Grant #0811205), shared with a CC BY NC 4.0 license.