Mentee Best Practices

Talk with your mentor about what you think mentoring means in general and what you would like it to mean in this relationship. Listen to what your mentor says about these things. Share what would make the mentoring relationship rewarding for you and learn what would make it rewarding for your mentor. Talk about what you need regarding confidentiality and ensure you and your mentor reach shared understanding.

Remember that facets of our identities and our past experiences shape the lenses through which we experience mentoring relationships, and that this goes for mentors too. Reflect on your current assumptions about mentoring and how they have been shaped and be ready to talk about them. 

Being conscious of your strengths and weaknesses and your tendencies toward bias is also helpful to getting off to a good start with a new mentor. Prepare how you will talk about those things. By raising these topics when introducing yourself and by expressing curiosity about your mentor, you can work toward your preferred expectations for reciprocity, frankness, and openness.  

Recognize that one mentor can’t meet all your needs. Learn your mentor’s limits and boundaries. Use these details as you incorporate this mentor into your mentor network. Think about how you will know when this mentoring relationship has run its course. If you have ideas about a time period or milestone after which this mentoring arrangement would end or evolve, share those.
 

Each time you interact with your mentor, you will maximize their ability to be helpful to you if you have thought ahead about the interaction and what you need to do to meet your obligations in it.

Ensure any pre-meeting work is completed, such as research you will do, materials you will draft, or arrangements you will make. If you run into obstacles, notify your mentor in advance if you will not complete things and decide whether to meet anyway to discuss those obstacles or reschedule for another time soon.

Have some objectives in mind for your interaction, and share with your mentor what those are, such as tasks you will complete together, feedback you will get, or action items you will each agree to.
 

Offer to take care of details like setting up calendar invitations, summarizing discussions and agreed-upon action items for both yourself and your mentor, or handling logistics of any events you will attend together. By carrying some of this load, you preserve your mentor’s time and energy for helping you.

Not every interaction must be synchronous. According to your negotiated shared preferences, use shared files and email or other asynchronous means to make progress or share updates when you can. 
 

Mentors find value in mentoring relationships when their mentees work hard to use their input to achieve their professional goals and find success. Seeing you succeed provides more satisfaction and motivation to some mentors than any extrinsic reward or recognition. Think about how to show your mentor the effort you have expended toward your goal, and how their mentoring has helped you.

When you are with your mentor, give them your full attention. Use active listening skills and tools for remembering what they tell you and show evidence of understanding by putting those ideas to use.

Having expertise means knowing something that is important but not obvious. Be open to your mentor’s suggestions, even if they aren’t intuitive at first. Even if your mentor’s direct advice doesn’t work in your specific situation, consider how it may provide a metaphor, approach, or heuristic that you could modify for your own purposes. Share with your mentor how you have built on their ideas in the actions you take.

Life happens. Timelines can shift and goals can evolve. If you must change a deadline or action plan that you and your mentor have talked about, keep them informed about how you are making adjustments to meet the end goals they are helping you with.