Mentoring Guidelines

Developing a Mentoring Relationship:

Since both you and your mentor/mentee have volunteered to participate in this program, it makes sense that you are looking forward to developing a mentoring relationship that works. Here are some suggested guidelines to consider as you develop your relationship:

• Schedule: Create a mentoring schedule that is doable for both of you, including locations/methods of meeting, as well as frequency and length of meeting times.  Make a commitment to stick to it. Consider setting actual dates and times up front and putting those on your own calendars. Keep rescheduling to a minimum.
• Communication: Establish communication ground rules that will allow a comfortable, open, honest, respectful, and confidential exchange.  Be practical when sending messages; reply promptly to messages sent to you.
• Goals: Establish a realistic set of mentoring goals given the amount of time each of you can devote to the relationship.
• Behavior: Demonstrate professional and ethical behavior with each other by making this about professional development of the mentee/peer mentee and not complaint sessions about workplace issues (e.g., OK to ask for advice on navigating tough workplace issues, but best to not include names of individuals in the process).

Types of Mentoring Relationships

There's a lot of flexibility around mentoring. Consider engaging in a variety of mentoring relationships to meet your needs. For example, you can maintain a traditional senior-junior mentoring relationship for long-term professional goals while cultivating any number of other group, peer, co-mentor or other arrangements to support short term projects or learning.

• Formal, traditional one-to-one mentoring
  
• Mentoring 2.0 (e-mentoring, crowd source, anonymous, micro, speed mentoring)
• Reverse/co-mentoring
• Group/team mentoring (networks, mentoring circles)
  
• Peer mentoring
• Diversified mentoring relationships
  

Setting Mentoring Goals:

Identifying a realistic set of mentoring goals is the first challenge in your relationship. If you are open and honest with each other, you will begin learning about each other during this process.

• Mentees: to identify your mentoring goals, you might consider what it is that inspired you to sign up for this mentoring program. What do you want to work on? What do you hope to gain from this relationship?

• Mentors: when you discover what your mentee wants to work on, be honest as to which of those goals you know enough about to be of help to the mentee. Also, given your experience, you might consider suggesting goals that could target what your mentee is wanting to gain from the relationship, especially if the mentee is having difficulty identifying her/his goals.
  
  
• Peer mentors/mentees: share your lists of goals with each other, prioritize them, and identify a reasonable number of goals to work on together. Be careful to include some goals that each peer considers top priority so both of you end up with satisfying results.
  

Reaching an End Point:

Sample Mentoring Agreement Form.docx

Use this as a conversation starter. Modify to suit your needs.