Peer Mentoring | Everyone Needs a Mentor

Mentoring between peers, although by no means as widespread in formal structures as traditional mentoring, is increasingly common. For example, newly appointed chairpersons of National Health Trusts - highly experienced, very effective people within other roles - now have the opportunity for a peer mentor while they get used to the job. In this case, there is a very specific experience gap to address. In many other examples of peer mentoring, however, particularly where the relationship is established informally, there is no single experience gap to focus upon. Both parties have simply recognised the value the other person can provide in offering support, counsel and a different perspective on the issues they face. This kind of highly accepting, let's-work-on-what-matters-at-the-moment relation- ship usually involves a strong sense of friendship and may have very ill-defined goals.

I have been lucky enough to have a handful of peer mentoring relationships over the years and have found that the level of challenge I receive, from someone who knows me and cares enough about me to be a critical friend, is higher than in any of the hierarchical mentoring relationships I have experienced. No one has ever been as tough on me as my peer mentors, and I am grateful for it. Beattie and McDougall (1995), who studied peer mentoring relationships at Glasgow Caledonian University, also found that trust and insight can be heightened when the participants are equal in status.

For an organisation wishing to encourage mentoring, it seems that the best way to promote informal peer mentoring is to develop the habit of mentoring through more traditional programmes. The traditional mentor can also help learners think about and develop their learning net - the web of people around them, from whom they can usefully learn. The learning net includes direct reports, people in relevant professional associations and, of course, peers either within their working area or outside.

In seeking a peer mentor, the following guidelines may be helpful:

Look for sufficient difference in experience and personality to provide a different set of perspectives.
Seek someone who will be genuine and honest with you, no matter how painful what they have to say may be.
Be accessible to each other on a regular basis (e-mail makes this much easier than used to be the case - see Chapter 16).
Try to articulate what you value in each other - this will encourage you both to approach the other whenever you have something to chew over.
Do not regard it as an exclusive relationship; seek to develop a number of relationships with people whose perspective you value for different things.