Mentoring Conversation Cards
“These cards are an excellent partner to the workbooks – a fantastic tool!”
Senior Executive, The Ritz Hotel
Our Mentoring Conversation Cards are hugely popular. They act as energisers, prompts, food for thought, and inspiration. They’re equally valuable for mentors and mentees. They enable engaging and constructive discussions.
Mentoring conversations can be stimulating and provide learning for both mentors and mentees. Great mentoring conversations can shift thinking. They provide powerful insights and are a catalyst for change and development.
However, with a full workload and limited time, those rich, thought-provoking questions can be elusive. The answer?
The cards are an excellent complement to our eBooks for mentors and mentees, following the same structure and providing yet more resources for lively and engaging mentoring conversations.
Our cards can be used in a variety of ways:
- As a part of our mentor and mentee workshops
- As a tool to refresh and inspire mentors
- By both mentees and mentors
- As a resource to use together during meetings
Mentoring Conversations
Mentoring conversations should evolve as the mentoring relationship develops. So, whilst the style of questions should remain fairly similar, the type of questions should change over time.
In the early days of a relationship between mentor and mentee, mentoring conversations will be exploratory with a key aim of building trust. Mentors questions should be thoughtful and curious as they get to know their mentee. The idea at this stage is to understand your mentee, what makes them tick, what’s important to them and what they want from mentoring. It’s the same from the mentees perspective too – getting to know your mentor is a vital part of building trust and a successful partnership.
As time progresses and you know each other better, mentoring conversations should focus largely, but not exclusively, on the goals of the mentee. They are likely to be more probing, perhaps challenging at times so as to help the mentee to think more deeply, examine multiple perspectives and understand alternative ideas.
However, there needs to be some flexibility to deal with whatever comes up for mentees that may be a barrier to learning and to their focus. We recommend what we call “check in” at the beginning of meetings. A simple “How’s it going?” isn’t enough to provide a safe space for mentees to share difficulties or problems. Try asking what’s gone particularly well since you last met or what’s been the biggest topic on their plate in past weeks. These questions will quickly get to anything on your mentee’s mind.
The Mentoring Conversation cards are divided into 4 sections which represent the flow of mentoring relationship. These are:
Preparing Yourself Getting Started Making Progress Maintaining Momentum