Getting Started

Although a handful of companies start the whole process with a meeting at which the line manager or the scheme co-ordinator facilitates, in general this is perceived to be unnecessarily intrusive. Instead, mentor and mentee are usually encouraged to meet at a mutually convenient and not too formal place to work out on their own how they want to run their relationship. However, the primary objective of the first meeting is to get to know each other and build the rapport they will need to make the relationship work.

At this or the next meeting, the mentee should also be prepared to share with the mentor any information he or she has that is relevant to issues he or she wants to work on - for example, performance appraisals, assessment centre results or the outcomes of psychometric tests undertaken. I often ask my mentees to record once a week or so the three things that have most pleased and most frustrated them. Then either we examine the list together, to look for patterns, or the mentees extract their own meaning from the list before we meet. In this way, the dialogue becomes grounded in actual, recent experience rather than hypotheticals. Long-term developmental goals can be illuminated through examining more recent successes and failures.