E The Magazine For Today's Female Executive August 2018 issue

Being face-to-face can also create a sense of
intimacy and increases the emotional connection
within the dyad, as the opportunity
exists for emotions driving behaviours and
actions to be picked up via facial expressions
and body language; visual cues that are lost
when using voice-only communication.
These cues may provide hidden clues to
struggles and barriers that a mentor or
mentee are experiencing and may become
the cog in results if not identified, discussed
and resolved.
2 Ask open ended questions
For a mentee, open-ended questions allow
for more details to be learned; these details
can be what links concepts or processes together
(e.g. How would I best learn how to
… ? Why do we have short-term and longterm
goals? How would I apply using fractions
in real life? ).
For the mentor, being asked open-ended
questions draw on their knowledge at a
deeper level, usually causing them to have to
reflect on what they know and their
experience in order to formulate the best
possible answer or provide the mentee
with more than one scenario or answer to
the question. This reinforces the mentors
expertise and sense of confidence in not
only being able to provide a value-added
answer, but to be able to communicate it
in a way that someone else will be able to
utilize their experience.
The use of open-ended questions allows
for mentors to create case studies and
scenarios to challenge the mentees growing
knowledge and experience. This requires
a higher level of cognitive thinking
and creates connections between
knowledge and experience. These types
of questions can create a bit of fun for
mentors, as they can use their imagination
faculties to be creative in constructing fun,
theoretical scenarios for the mentee.
From the mentees perspective, the use of
these type of open ended questions really
draws on their ability to connect multiple
ideas and concepts together with details
Page 170 E The Magazine for Today’s Female Executive
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