mentors and mentees meeting and showing reports on how they can keep improving and succeeding with and outside the relationship

July 7, 2017

Successful Mentoring Relationships: 6 Tips for Mentees

Have you ever had a mentor? Was it a good or bad experience? It may have been a great experience, you both got on as friends, but did learning actually take place? Here are 6 tips to ensure learning takes place next time.

Understand how mentoring relationship works - It’s not coaching. The biggest tip is understand that the relationship is mentee driven, but mentor guided. This means you as the mentee needs to decide what you want to develop on, set all appointments, track your goals and record all notes after each meeting.
You need a have a goal - Before you search for a mentor, you need to have a career goal and how a mentor could support you achieving this goal. This can be terribly frustrating for a mentor, if you meet and you have no idea what you want to achieve. It’s not up to the mentor to decide your career goal since remember it's mentee driven.
Find a mentor that can actually help you. – This includes understanding what experience does your mentor need to have to help you achieve that goal. The mentor should not been assigned to help you, but should have volunteered. If they have been assigned then you have a coach.
Your first mentoring meeting – The first meeting should be more about learning about each other, making sure there is some chemistry, then you need discuss what you want to achieve out of the relationship and the ground rules. Ground rules include, how often you should meet, where to meet, confidentiality parameters, what is the process if one part can’t attend the next meeting.
Your mentoring agreement – In the first meeting, you ground rules need to be written down. We recommend a mentoring agreement, but it can be as informal as a email that recaps the rules. This documentation can then be used if there are any issues.
Relationship not working? – Have a discussion, get both perspectives, review the mentoring agreement. Normally these can be resolved with an open discussion. If you can't, then should end the relationship or contact your program administrator for further guidance.

These are some basic tips for mentees, you can learn more about our mentee training courses by visiting mentoring training.

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