EQUALITY GUIdE - KU Leuven

Chapter 5 ! Mentoring 249
fact that there was a limited number of Faculties/Departments, the latter criterion was
difficult to realize for all matches.
The argument against single-department mentoring is the fear of favouritism. Favouritism
refers to the mentor’s ability to intervene on the mentee’s behalf and provide exposure
and protection. Another argument for cross-department duos is the assumption
that a mentor from a different field of expertise may be better able to give advice on
difficult relationships than people who already have their own views on the protagonists.
Thirdly, a cross-departmental approach provides a wider perspective and opens
up broader and different networks and skills. Although these arguments seem defensible,
the good practice in the pilot project at UHasselt gave no evidence. There were
extremely good mentoring relations across one specific department. A counter-argument
could be that the knowledge and experience of the mentor within the specific
academic and scientific field/department is of great importance. And last but not least,
protection and sponsorship is something the university (and steering committee/mentors/mentees)
wants to avoid. The programme is strongly based on self-reliance
and pro-activity of mentees.
The mentees were notified by e-mail with a proposition of their mentor in the programme.
They were asked to react if they did not agree with the match. They also got
the assurance that all relationships were probationary for the first meeting with their
proposed mentor. One of the mentees asked for another mentor because the proposed
mentor appeared to be the father of her best friend. As a result of this personal reason
the proposed duos changed.
From this pilot can be concluded that good practice appears to be that mentees are
guided in their selection, but left to make up their own minds.
3.4.4. Training
Literature, case studies and good practice on mentoring unanimously state that ‘training
is essential and one of the key processes’.
Together versus apart
Mentors and mentees are often trained together to prepare them for the programme.
This is based on the idea that mentor and mentee are involved in a long-term programme
(at least one year) of which the joint training is a first explanation on how and
on which issues the duos are going to work together. However, at UHasselt the programme
took place in a six-month period. The starting point here was that the mentee
would shape the relationship in the sense that she had to decide which topics she
wanted to work on with the mentor. Because of the specific role of the mentees, they
were trained separately from the mentors.
There was also a mentor meeting at the start of the programme. The aim of this meeting
was to make mentors aware of the importance of development programmes for