When mentors or mentees express disappointment in their partnerships, it’s often because the purposes of the relationship weren’t frankly communicated and agreed upon. You can help your mentees define those purposes.

When you begin working with mentees, explore their expectations, and decide together on the overall purposes of each mentoring relationship.

Four Categories

Faith-Centered Mentoring and More recommends that the main purposes of your mentoring relationships are to help your mentees develop character and build competencies. In addition, your mentees may want to gain knowledge, and/or change attitudes, beliefs, or feelings.

Let’s look at examples of what you could choose within the four broad categories. Remember, they are only examples from among dozens or even hundreds of possibilities.

• Developing Christlike Character – You can help your mentees identify “markers” of Jesus’ character that they want to develop in themselves. For example: kindness, patience, boldness, commitment to God.
  
  
• Building Competencies – You could assist with:
  
  - Increasing Skills. You could help them develop spiritual skills (e.g., praying silently and out loud, reflecting on scripture, forgiving and receiving forgiveness, building friendship with God); technical skills (e.g., managing projects, preparing budgets); career development skills (e.g., determining career paths in the organization, creating a better resume); leadership skills (e.g., gaining consensus, making presentations, writing effectively); or general life skills (e.g., parenting, improving relationships).
  
  - Gaining Knowledge. You might assist with their knowledge of the Bible and how to enjoy it. You could help them identify key people and resources in your organization, backgrounds on decisions made in the past, or the written and unwritten rules of the organization and life.
  
  - Changing Attitudes/Beliefs/Feelings. This group is similar to Developing Christlike Character. You might help mentees change or add to their beliefs about God, life, people, and problems. You could help them recognize their feelings and handle them in more Christlike ways.

Many choices! As a mentor working with a mentee for a year or less, you certainly can’t focus on all of these. That’s why it’s so important to clarify with your mentees what you’re both willing and able to do. What do you know how to do quite well? What interests you? How much time do you have? Be open about these matters, and spend all the time you need to define the purpose of each relationship.

Inappropriate Purposes

We’ve learned over the years that some purposes are clearly unadvisable:

• “Preaching at” your mentees or pressuring them on their spiritual growth
  
  
• Doing your mentees’ work for them (you can, of course, coach)
  
  
• Promising them a job, promotion, or other goal
  
  
• “Bashing” their bosses or others in their lives (although you can help them learn to relate better with these individuals)
  
  
• Helping them extensively with personal problems (better to refer them)
  
  
• Doing anything your organization prohibits (anything to do with sinful/illegal/unethical issues)

Next Step

Once you pray about and come to agreement on the overall purpose, zero in on one to three major goals to reach during your partnership. You can always change these or add to them as the relationship progresses. With your mentees, write these down, set up development activities to help the mentees learn, monitor progress, and celebrate even small steps toward success!

For more ideas on being effective mentor, check our What We Offer and Archive. Consider ordering the Christ-Centered Mentor’s Handbook.