The mentor’s function is to provide appropriate assistance in support of the mentee’s progress towards a desired goal. To decide what assistance is appropriate requires you to combine logic, wisdom and intuition. This is a challenge that runs through both your individual conversations and the overall relationship. Most of us develop our ability to mentor through experience, trial and error, and learning from what worked and what didn’t. Even if you are given initial training to be a mentor, ultimately you will learn the most through practice.

While there is no right or wrong in the type of assistance that you offer, there are ‘better’ and ‘worse’ types of assistance which are determined by the results they create. For example, you may take the route of story telling because you enjoy talking about yourself, but if the mentee doesn’t benefit in some way from hearing your stories, then telling them was an ineffective form of assistance. Depending on the situation, a mixture of forms of assistance might work best.