Mentoring is one of best ways to learn, to get feedback, and to take your career to next level. Here are ten tips for making most of your mentoring relationships.

Tip #1 Self-assess. Ask yourself, "What skills do I need to get where I want to go?"

Tip #2 Identify your learning goals. Put them in writing.

Tip #3 Decide together how mentoring relationship will work - frequency and type of contact.

Tip #4 Commit time. Don’t give up if chemistry doesn’t feel right at first meeting. Meet a minimum of once per month. Touch base regularly - by e-mail, phone, in person.

Tip #5 Take time to build trust and communication. Get to know each other on a personal level. Discuss your backgrounds, interests, career histories, and perspectives of your organizations.

Tip #6 Keep confidences. Nothing kills trust in a mentoring relationship faster than a breach of confidence.

In bestseller, Good to Great, Jim Collins discovered that, "the good-to-great companies continually refined path to greatness with brutal facts of reality."

And, in his recent autobiography, Jack Welch reports that he spent about half of his time on people: recruiting new talent, picking right people for particular positions, grooming young stars, developing managers, dealing with under performers, and reviewing entire talent pool.

Says Welch, "Having most talented people in each of our businesses is most important thing. If we don’t, we lose."

Why is it that many of us put off giving feedback to our employees even though we intuitively know that giving and getting honest feedback is essential to grow and develop and to build successful organizations? Maybe it is because there are so many ways to screw it up.

Here are ten common feedback mistakes:

1.Speaking out only when things are wrong. "Praise to a human being represents what sunlight, water and soil are to a plant - climate in which one grows best." - Earl Nightingale

2."Drive-by" praise without specifics or an honest underpinning. - "Great job!"

3.Waiting until performance or behavior is substantially below expectations before acting on it.

4.Giving positive or negative feedback long after event has occurred.

5.Not taking responsibility for your thoughts, feelings and reactions. "This comes straight from boss."

6.Giving feedback through e-mail messages, notes, or over telephone.

7.Giving negative feedback in public.

8.Criticizing performance without giving suggestions for improvement.

9.No follow up afterwards.

10.Not having regularly scheduled performance review meetings.