Do you believe that it is possible to ask people to serve as mentors or become mentees? Why?
Yes, it is possible to ask to serve as either a mentor or a mentee but I feel it’s not to be forced on anyone. Not everyone is mentor material but everyone is mentee material. I am a mentor at my job and I did work with a mentor when I first arrived over four years ago. I wasn’t in a, per say, mentee capacity at that time nor was I forced to be a mentee. I was given the name of a Senior person who had lots of years on the job. I utilized him to my advantage but not for every single issue/problem that arose. I did, however, fall on/depend on a couple of my co-workers that started the same time that I did.
Since Covid, we had to transition from having our training conducted off site and out of state as Covid has forced all agencies to train their own people in a new training and mentorship program. We (the mentors and trainers) were not forced to volunteer to become either one but was asked. We are about to head into our second round of trainings and I am again a trainer first then I will be a mentor. I especially love being a mentor at my job because it takes me from training to mentoring. Our textbook said, “Jose Yanes served as a mentor for several employees at Ford Motor Company and found that serving as a mentor helped his own personal development by helping him improve his own communication skills and work harder at building trust with other people” (p. 421). For me, being a mentor has helped me to be better at my job with situations that come up that either haven’t come up before or situations that I had forgotten about.
Being a mentor at my office reminds me of continually teaching another person that came after me. After the training is complete, I mentor them on what to do or not to do, answer questions that they could not find in our manual, provide guidance, lift them up when they get stressed, etc. Unlike the training portion, there is no written program or document on how we carry out the mentoring to our mentees. It’s pretty much trial by error, do as you wish or what you feel works out for all. They let us do our own mentoring the way we want to do it. It must be working because we still have the entire group that had to do the first round of training and mentoring the new Covid way.
Reference:
Noe, R. A., Hollenbeck, J. R., & Gerhart, B. A. (2021). Human Resource Management: Gaining a competitive advantage. McGraw-Hill Education.