Did you ever have a bad professor in college? Were you confused or annoyed at this experience? When you went to school you learned that just because someone is an “expert” in something doesn’t mean they can teach it.  (They’re sometimes called professors!) But we continually ignore this lesson when we ask experienced employees to mentor millennials.

It’s one thing to offer career advice by telling your story and drawing on your experience, but it’s another to expect subject matter experts to transfer practical knowledge about doing a job. That’s the type of mentoring I am talking about here.

Having great mentors is the most effective way to improve knowledge transfer in your organization. But it doesn’t happen naturally. Recently, I worked with employees at MasterCard to improve their mentoring skills. Here are three lessons I shared in that workshop.

1. “Find the feeling” – Why mentoring matters

Everyone in your company feels overloaded with work today. So asking them to take on the role of teaching a colleague is likely to be met with resistance or passive non-compliance.

To create effective mentoring relationships, people must be emotionally connected to why they’re doing it. Instead of just telling experienced employees they’re going to mentor someone, ask them to reflect on the most effective mentoring relationships they’ve been involved in. Why was this relationship so valuable?

Help employees connect emotionally with why teaching someone is a worthwhile experience – for them and for the company. Everyone is so busy today that unless they’re emotionally invested in an activity that takes time and patience, it will quickly get ignored.

2. Mentors must coach their mentees how to communicate with them

How do you prefer to interact with people at work? Face-to-face, email, texting, phone, Skype?  As my co-author Steve Trautman says in his terrific book “Teach What You Know,” mentors have to coach those they’re teaching about the best ways to communicate with them. Everyone has unique communication preferences and you shouldn’t leave mentees guessing about what they are:

• “Never leave me a voice mail. I don’t check it.”
• “Texts are fine for quick questions, but not before noon when I’m focused on creative work.”
• “f I don’t respond to your email by the end of the day, send it again.”
• “Friday mornings are best for meetings involving detailed questions.”

There is no right or wrong set of communication preferences, but you will create a much more productive mentoring relationship if you coach your less experienced colleague on how best to interact with you.

3. Use a “5-minute meeting plan” to give your mentee what they really need to know.

You actually know a lot more than you need to teach, and one of the most effective tools for making sure you transfer knowledge that your mentee really needs is the “5 minute meeting plan.” This deceptively simple tool, described in Trautman’s book, will keep you from overloading your colleague.

The problem is the person you’re teaching often calls or shows up at your desk at a time when you’ve given no thought to what you want to tell them about performing a particular task. The default behavior is to just start “winging” it. After all, you’re the expert on the subject. As a result, you’ll almost always overload and confuse your poor mentee with lots of extraneous and poorly organized information.

A much better tactic is to delay the meeting for five minutes while you jot down answers to the following questions:

• What’s the meeting’s purpose? What will your mentee be able to DO afterwards?
• What is the relationship of the information you’re sharing to their current job? Why is this information important?
• What are the main points you want to make? (Put them in logical order. It makes them much easier to learn.)
• What jargon do they need to know? Key acronyms or words that might be confusing?
• Are there opportunities or ways they can practice this new skill or activity?
• What other resources are available if they have questions?

Spending five minutes organizing what you want to communicate will make you a much more effective mentor. It’s a simple tool and it has a big impact. This was probably the most popular tool I shared with managers at MasterCard in my “Mentoring for Fun & Profit” workshop. Contact me if you want to explore more ways to boost the mentoring capabilities in your organization.