Mentoring Quiz: Finding and Working With a Mentor

Here are a few quick questions to test your knowledge about mentoring:

1. Is mentoring the same as coaching?
2. True or false - The term for someone being mentored is mentee?
3. Would it be a good idea to ask your boss or supervisor to be your mentor?
4. Is there benefit for someone in the trades, a professional occupation or the owner of a business to have a mentor?

We have some comments related to each of these questions that you will find at the end of this post.  If these questions have piqued your curiosity, please take a few moments to review it and much more information that we found in a longer article on the Alberta Learning Information Service (ALIS) website.  ALIS is the provincial gateway to help Albertans plan and achieve educational and career success!  It provides information for career planning, post-secondary education and training, educational funding, job search, labour market trends, and workplace issues.

Over the years, we've had opportunity to refer many people to this site for career related information. It's a great resource that is worthy of further exploration.  We have included a link to the full article on the ALIS site at the very end of this post.

The following comments expand upon the information found in the ALIS article, for each of the questions noted in the above quiz:

1) While there are many things that mentoring and coaching have in common, there is also frequent confusion between the two.  Mentoring is different than coaching.  A coach focuses on specific goals, such as improving sales or learning how to present effectively.  The time line is usually much shorter than in mentoring.  A mentor helps you with the overall development of your career, including your short and long-term career goals.  Professor David Clutterbuck, well recognized author on mentorship, often says that coaching is focused more on "doing", and has a performance perspective. Mentoring on the other hand, is focused more on "becoming", and is concerned with the longer term development of the individual.

2) The statement above is true.  The term for someone being mentored is "mentee", although another common term for the mentee is "protege".  While the use of the terms mentee and protege for most people are interchangeable, some academics point to subtle differences between developmental mentoring and sponsorship mentoring which can lead to the use of the respective terms.

3) The answer to this question will depend on your situation.  To deviate from the comments on the ALIS website, our experience is that mentors are of greatest value to the mentee when they can help the mentee gain perspective on longer term development.  To bring this back to their current situation would involve helping the mentee more completely grasp the 'why' and the 'when', related to 'what' they might do in a specific instance.  For the mentee who reports to someone within the organization, their immediate supervisor or boss is very likely focused on getting the work done on time, within budget and moving onto the next task on their schedule.  In other words, they may be too caught up in the day-to-day issues of the workplace to offer the mentee the type of developmental perspective needed to move them up the career ladder.

4) The reality is that just about everyone can benefit from the guidance, support and encouragement of an effective mentor.  And beyond that, mentors also benefit and grow from the experience of having mentored someone else.  Mentorship is a mutually beneficial experience where exchanges take place between the two mentoring partners and growth occurs to further the development of both parties.

As mentioned above, we encourage you to read the entire article which can be found on the ALIS website at: http://alis.alberta.ca/ep/eps/tips/tips.html?EK=12437