Mentoring FAQs

What is professional mentoring?

Mentoring is a developmental partnership where one person shares their knowledge and experience to help foster the personal and professional growth of someone who is often less experienced than they are.

What are the benefits of mentoring?

“Colleagues are a wonderful thing, but mentors – that’s where the real work gets done.”

– Junot Diaz

For mentees:

• Feeling valued and rewarded

• Exposure to new ways of thinking fresh ideas, perspectives, and different approaches, which can lead to greater innovation

• The power to accelerate self-development, career progression and the opportunity to reflect on their own goals and practices

• Increased self-confidence to share ideas or stand up for themselves in challenging situations or at times of conflict

• Greater self-awareness

• Being comfortable seeking and receiving feedback and using that to improve their performance

• Feeling less isolated and anxious about both their future and their own abilities

• Mentoring can support better mental health and wellbeing

For organisations:

• Visibly demonstrate that people are valued

• A positive and nurturing company culture around learning and growth, that creates teams who feel satisfied and happy at work, making them more productive

• Better diversity and inclusion because mentoring can help the more ‘marginalised’ have a greater voice to make their valued contributions which in turn can increase gender and ethnic diversity in leadership roles

• Mentoring has a positive effect on employee engagement and retention, with less attrition and increased productivity from motivated employees

• Supports recruitment. Access to mentoring is an attractive perk for many people, particularly millennials, who expect mentoring and development opportunities from employers Inexpensive with a significant return on investment

• Leads to more innovation from engaged and ‘loyal’ employees

What’s the difference between mentoring and coaching?

This is an area that always eludes decisive definition, and the overlap is large. The differences are subtle and there is a lack of agreement among professionals about precise definitions. However, it is generally agreed that there are different characteristics between the two:

• Mentoring helps facilitate a culture of growth and development by concentrating on the individual’s own defined development needs and goals based on their aspirations. The relationship concentrates on them and their ‘agenda’. There is no need for feedback to others as an outcome unless the Mentee chooses that for themselves.

• Coaching assesses and improves an individual’s performance in a particular area. It concentrates on an identified issue(s) with clear goals to develop skills and/or behaviours to meet specific goals and objectives and will be time-bound. There is generally an outcome or output expected by the ‘sponsor’ to assess the effectiveness of the coaching assignment.