Structuring a Mentoring Conversation

We suggest that you have mentoring sessions on a 4-6 weekly basis to maintain momentum in your mentoring relationship.

After the initial mentoring meeting to get to know each other and start to look at the mentee’s objectives, the subsequent mentoring sessions are to further identify the mentee’s development needs in the following ways:

• By the mentee’s own analysis and insight
• Reviewing any experiences or situations they have encountered since your last meeting to see what they have learnt, and how they will use that learning in future
• Progress against the development goals in their personal development plan, or other agreed objectives.

In order to gain the most from your mentoring sessions it helps to follow a structured approach, as described below.

Check-in at the start of each meeting:

• Start by re-establishing your rapport and feeling comfortable together
• Follow-up on commitments and actions from the last session
• Mentee shares recent experiences (challenges, opportunities, and successes)
• Mentor and mentee explore recent issues and challenges and discuss options and approaches. Mentor should feel free to share personal stories and anecdotes.

Checking in questions to use:

• How are you?
  What’s on your mind?
• Any reflections/follow up from
  last time?
  What has happened since our last conversation?
• What should be the agenda today?

Development Dialogue: Body of the conversation

The mentor will probably use a process model for this part of the conversation e.g. The Three Stage Process, GROW or CLEAR, or just listen as a Thinking Partner. During this part of the conversation:

• Regularly review progress against the objectives
• Assess the need to revise or update the objectives
• Identify development opportunities and solutions
• Encourage self-management – the mentor’s role in the relationship is not to create dependencies by dictating problem-solving techniques and decisions to their mentee. Mentors should encourage mentees to manage the achievement of their objectives themselves and providing their experience as a source for ideas, letting the mentee choose and decide.
• Mentors should support, listen, challenge and only guide and provide advice at the request of their mentee once they have gained some insight themselves into the issues being discussed.

Checking out and next steps:

Clarify any commitments made and anything that needs follow-up, and confirm next session date, time and agenda, if the mentee is comfortable to do this.  Ensure you review both the process and outcomes from the session:

Checking out ideas:

• Mutual feedback on how the session went
• What does the mentee want more or less of for next time? (feedback, listening, advice, challenge etc)
• Where are we in the life cycle?
• What are the main learning and action points from the meeting?
• Do we want to organise the next session?

Feedback

Providing feedback, negative as well as positive, is an important role that a mentor and mentee can play. Both the mentor and mentee should ensure that they allow two-way feedback to take place and check-in with their mentoring partner regularly to see if the sessions are working or if changes need to be made.