Mentoring can come in many forms, but perhaps the most common and the best known is that which takes place between two people, the mentor and their mentee. This is a classic counselling and coaching methodology too and as many of the skills from both of these disciplines are brought into the mentoring relationship, it is perhaps not unsurprising that it has been adopted across the board. This is the model that is used by the Mowgli Foundation, where we pair and entrepreneur (mentee) with an experienced business person (mentor). The work will almost always begin by establishing the goals that the mentee is hoping to achieve and by setting some ground rules for the process that will take place. In our case, this is an agreement to ‘meet’ together (online and using Skype mostly) once per month to discuss progress and set targets, but this can be varied according to the need of each party.
The nature of the work is confidential and what is disclosed in the course of a session will remain confidential to the two parties who are working together, however every mentor will almost certainly be required to have some sort of regular ‘supervision’ which allows them to offload issues they are having as a result of their mentoring work. Those issues will be discussed in the context of how it impacts upon the mentor usually, sometimes they may ask for advice from their supervisor about how to deal with something that the mentee has brought up, hoping to identify best practice along the way.
