1. Mentoring is a customizable solution. Choose from a variety of models and tweak the model even further to match your organization’s goals.
2. Mentoring doesn’t happen only once in a person’s life. If we’re lucky, we’re constantly being mentored and mentoring others, both formally and informally.
3. Mentoring can happen outside of work. Some people point to the fact that certain types of companies, like busy startups, don’t have the bandwidth to provide formal mentoring programs. Fair enough. But you can still find and work with a mentor outside of the workplace. There’s no “rule” saying it has to be someone from the office.
4. Yes, you can have more than one mentor at the same time. We’re finding this is especially important for the Millennial generation (something we’ll be talking about in a forthcoming white paper). Creating a mentoring network is perfectly acceptable. (Why wouldn’t it be?)
5. Mentoring, when done effectively, will be a transformative experience for the mentoree. This hasn’t changed, nor do we think it ever will.
6. Mentors often get just as much out of the mentoring relationship as the mentoree. Again, this hasn’t changed either, and we don’t think it ever will.
7. It is possible to have an enriching mentoring relationship through new media, like Skype. At Management Mentors, we’re big proponents of “face time.” We believe people need to be present (physically, ideally) in order to experience the important nuances of the “unspoken” and nonverbal gestures. But we also know that in this global world in which we live, sometimes getting two people together in the same room isn’t always feasible. But technology, like Skype, does make it possible to have face time. We’re excited to think where we’ll be in another quarter century… maybe we’ll be able to beam people up for a meeting?
8. Yes, the way we mentor today will be different from the way we mentor in 25, 50, and 100 years. We’ll still be mentoring though, mark our words.