When we say mentoring, we mean helping a person to make significant positive transitions in their knowledge, work or thinking, to enable them to achieve their goals and perform to meet their potential.

Mentoring is an effective ongoing work-focussed process to support someone to improve and/or maintain their performance, as part of their professional development. This is different to counselling, which is person-focussed and often triggered by a personal crisis.

High quality mentoring takes a highly individual approach, which is part of the key to its success. Triskell’s independence means we can tailor mentoring to meet the needs, and circumstances of the person that we are working with. Mentoring can take place in the workplace (or in more “neutral” territory if preferred). It can take place in person and/or using email and the telephone.

Mentees come from all kinds of creative, commercial, industrial and public sector settings – the people who tend to get the most from mentoring are people with ability and knowledge, who want to (and need to) achieve high levels of performance.

In mentoring, the mentor offers guidance and advice to support and facilitate another person’s learning, performance and wider overall development, usually based on the mentor having expert knowledge, having faced similar challenges and developed relevant competences and experience(s) to share with the mentee. Often mentoring does not include specific goals and measurable results in the way that coaching does. These are significant differences to coaching.

Mentoring may be a longer term relationship, compared to coaching. It includes encouraging, challenging supportively and offering advice and guidance to help the client to develop for the future (i.e. beyond the needs of their current employment or situation).

A wide range of people who have ability and knowledge use mentoring to develop their skills in the workplace. Mentoring provides a safe environment to share whatever critical issues they feel impact on their professional and personal success.

Clearly there is a need for an honest and ethical approach within mentoring: goals must be realistic and achievable – and the mentee and/or their business or organisation actually need to have good potential and to want to take a motivated and professional approach to achieving their goals.

Techniques used as part of the mentoring process include…

• goal setting and action planning
• motivation
• responses to failure and success
• belief systems
• techniques for change

Find out more about how other people feel they have benefitted from coaching.