Mentoring Future Leaders

Mentoring Future Leaders
The role of a mentor is to “enable the mentee to explore, to gain a better
understanding, to become more aware and from that place to make a
better decision than they would have made anyway.” (p.15)
The complete repertoire of mentoring skills should be mastered and
integrated with the mentor’s intelligence, intuition and imagination, in such
a way that the process becomes a “dance between two people,
conversationally moving in harmony and partnership, with no
conscious attention to structure or technique, but resembling a work
of art.” Like anything else which can be called art, “there are no rules,
but you’ve got to know them”.
“Coaching (mentoring) requires a relationship of great trust, where it is
safe for the coachee to be vulnerable, safe to acknowledge weaknesses
and mistakes, and safe to simply not know something. It is only in such
an environment that learning can happen, that a coachee can test out new
ideas.” (Downey, 1999, p.22)
© Learning Link International
April 2005
Module 4 - Mentoring Skills Page ! 1