Your main role as a mentor is to provide guidance and insight to your mentee. Instead of making decisions for them, your job is to help them weigh up the pros and cons of a situation so they can make sound decisions based on their own judgement. This means that there needs to be a lot of mutual trust invested in a mentor/mentee relationship.

As a mentor, you should:

• Maintain the confidence of your mentee, particularly in areas where they are using you as a confidante and exposing their own vulnerabilities.
  
  
• Be open to new ideas and provide advice from the perspective of what's best for them, rather than simply what you would do in that situation.
  
  
• Motivate your mentee to reach their full potential, and to set long-term goals for their skill development and career path.
  
  
• Remain professional at all times, and stay one step removed from the mentee's relationships with their work colleagues, particularly when there are problems that they need to resolve with others.
  
  
• Act as a role model by demonstrating ethical behaviour, sound decision-making processes and a general philosophy that values quality and integrity.

In the end, it is the mentee who must take responsibility for the decisions they make, because ultimately they will have to bear the consequences of their actions. So your over-riding approach should be to provide a safe and guiding environment for the mentee to analyse situations for themselves, explore different options, think through the likely outcomes of potential decisions, and develop the confidence to draw their own conclusions and take a particular course of action.

Sometimes it might be difficult knowing where to draw the line in helping your mentee to make the right decisions, or in encouraging them to go in a certain direction.

And if you're also the mentee's supervisor or employer, there will undoubtedly be times when your own goals and needs will not match your mentee's preferred course of action.

Have a think about the following two situations and write down your responses to the questions.

When the mentee is not your employee (or under your supervision):

• What would be a reasonable set of expectations to have of your mentee?
  
  
• What expectations would be reasonable for your mentee to have of you?
  
  
• Name some examples of unreasonable expectations or demands you might put on your mentee.
  
  
• Name some examples of unreasonable expectations or requests that your mentee might put on you.

When the mentee is your employee (or under your supervision):

• What advantages are there for you as a supervisor in also being the mentor?
  
  
• What are the advantages for the mentee in having you as their mentor?
  
  
• Name some disadvantages for you in being both supervisor and mentor.
  
  
• Name some disadvantages for them in being both subordinate and mentee?