- Not every small business or micro-enterprise owner needs a mentor.
- Mentoring is NOT the only helping relationship.
- Good mentors are rarely trained in ‘mentoring’, nor are they picked from a register.
- Successful mentors are usually selected from within the pre-existing network of the mentee. They are spotted and developed as someone from whom the mentee really wants to learn.
- Mentoring is an intermittent rather than a continuous relationship.
- Access to good mentors is usually restricted and respectful rather than a tradeable commodity.
- The success of the mentorship is usually down to the mentee rather than the mentor. Good mentees know how to choose a mentor and manage the relationship with them to get the learning and the introductions that they need.
- The commoditisation of mentoring is not a good thing.
- Mentors are not coaches, advisers, consultants, counsellors or facilitators. People looking to learn and develop themselves and/or their organisations should think carefully about the kind of ‘help’ they need.
- We should help people explore what they want to learn and how they are going to learn it – rather than prescribe yet another ‘cure-all’ that happens to be ‘affordable’.
- We should focus our efforts on building social learning contexts and helping people manage their learning processes rather than setting up registers and schemes.
- If the national association of image consultants got their lobbying act together I am sure we might all end up being encouraged to use a national register of image consultants in pursuit of GDP.
If you are interested in implementing ill thought through policy and exploiting it as way to make a few bob please do not get in touch. If on the other you are serious about building a context in which people can really learn then I would love to hear from you.
Just leave a comment below.