Create specific guidance for mentors
What guidance do mentors need?
In addition to your general guidance to all participants, and guidance for mentees you may want to create additional guidance specifically for mentors on your programme.
What you could include
What mentees are and what they expected to do
As with the mentee guidance, you could use a guidance document to explain to potential participants what a mentor is, and what ‘good’ participation in the programme looks like if you are a mentor. You could also use this as an opportunity to explain the benefits to mentors of taking part in your programme.
How the programme will work for mentees specifically
Building on the general guidance to all participants, you could explain in more detail how your programme will work specifically from the perspective of a mentor.
What you expect them to do will depend on how you structure your programme. Our guidance assumes you are running a two-stage programme, with speed mentoring followed by long-term mentoring. If you are following this process, your guidance could explain:
- the mentor’s role in facilitating the speed mentoring sessions
- the mentor’s role in supporting long-term mentoring arrangements
Techniques and resources to support mentoring conversations
Similar to the mentee guidance, you could also include further guidance on specific techniques to support mentoring sessions. You could also include resources from inside your organisation or from other, outside organisations for use in a mentoring session.
It is likely to be more important to provide detailed and varied guidance for mentors in this area, as they will need to rely on a more varied skill set to support their mentees.
Signposting to a code of conduct
You could signpost mentors to a code of conduct that governs how they will be expected to behave and interact with their mentees on the programme.
Example
Guidance for mentors
This document contains an example of the guidance you could provide to mentees participating in your programme. You can freely re-use and adapt this guidance document to suit your needs. Please note that this guidance references some third-party materials. You should provide appropriate referencing and credit to third-party sources.