It is good practice to spend at least 30 minutes and preferably more preparing for every mentoring meeting. It is important to think through what you want from the meeting and how you can achieve that ensures you will get the most from that meeting; this takes time.
By also advising your mentor in advance of your ideas, you allow them to have time to reflect and prepare to support you. When diaries are busy and time is precious, this preparation also gives you both the opportunity to reflect in advance of being together and avoid wasting the first 20 minutes establishing what the issue is.
Some good preparatory questions to reflect on in advance of meeting are:
- What issues remain from our last meeting?
- What do I want to achieve in this session?
- What sort of help from my mentor will support this? (i.e. listening, challenging, exploring networks etc)
- How can I help my mentor understand my issue, are there any documents, stories, examples of situations that will help clarify this?
- What has been particularly challenging for me in the last week/month?
The agenda belongs to the mentee, however, it is good to share this in advance with your mentor as this allows them to know what is important to you at this point and they can start doing some thinking around how they might support you with that.
It can be also be useful to maintain a regular diary of events or activities that have gone very well and those that have not gone so well. It can help to record, say once a week, key positive and negative events and reflect on:
- What happened
- When
- Who was involved
- What your role was
- What your intent was
- What their intent was
- What one or two factors you think contributed most to the way it turned out
This process of reflection typically reveals a range of issues, which you may not have recognised before, and which are worth bringing to mentoring meeting.
© David Clutterbuck, 2014