Mentors-talk: What should you self-commit to, before mentoring? (and why!)

Being a mentor is not just a nice enhancement to your skills and activities on your CV. It is a commitment.

You practically promise someone else that you are going to help them in both their career and self-development process.

Nevertheless, in our stressful and never-stopping domain of work, mentoring is a time and effort consuming process. In the end, both you (the mentor) and your mentee want to feel that you gained real value out of the experience.

The level of self-commitment depends tremendously on the type of mentorship you take upon yourself and how you frame it, both to yourself and to your mentee. In this post, we will take a deeper look at the different alternatives for mentoring framing and challenge ourselves to choose a mentoring frame/style that works to our needs.

Some categorize the experience into one of the following: ad-hoc mentorship, time framed mentorship, or goal-oriented mentorship:

Ad-hoc mentoring is when you provide your mentee with knowledge and advice on a non-obligatory basis, based on demand and interests with no clear schedule or agenda in mind. It may be a one-time encounter or a mentoring for life. The underlying assumption is that there is no commitment or any unspoken contract between the mentor and mentee. It looks more like a friendship. In such a mentorship setup it is usually less important to self-commit (it just happens by itself).

In both other types of mentorship, there is usually a more rigid setup between you and the mentee in which you agree to what you want to achieve. In such cases, it is better to ask yourself what are you willingly committing to before going into the process, communicate that commitment to your mentee and work out a plan that works for you both.

With a different portion of commitment and a higher degree of scheduling, we will find the other two types of mentorship:

Goal-oriented mentorship is when you start by defining an objective the mentee wants to achieve during the mentoring sessions. Once the objective is achieved, the sessions are usually concluded, or another objective can be agreed on.

Time framed mentorship is when there is an agreed period of time during which the sessions occur and after a certain amount of time, a new goal is set for the mentoring sessions. In such a situation, as you may want to achieve a few goals, the intensity of the sessions is very important.

Your self-commitment, the level of coherence of that commitment to your mentee, and your agreement on the terms would ensure a matching of expectations on both sides and will provide higher chances of fruitful discussions and a meaningful learnings experience.

Before diving into your mentoring adventure, I highly recommend to plan your commitment and set its values. Just like if it was a product! So what are your commitment’s KPIs?

• Level of periodic engagement: Weekly, biweekly, monthly and for how long (half hour, hour).
• Level of engagement aside from the meeting such as session preparation.
• Your level of responsiveness. Through which platforms?
• Type of engagement you are comfortable with: face to face, video conference, or both.
• If you are meeting your mentee in person, where are your meetings going to happen? Both geographically and in terms of setting (office? cafe? home?).
• What are you willing and allowed to share and discuss? Everyone must feel comfortable.
• What would you like the outcome of the mentoring sessions to be? This is the time to set goals!

Read The Mentor Manifesto by David Cohen for additional inspiration.