Kicking Off and Maintaining your Relationship
Here we have a short guide to help you kick off your relationship and maintain it successfully throughout the program.
Before the first meeting
Before the first meeting, agree via e-mail or Slack with which tools you want to communicate, how frequently and how long you want your meetings to be and which times work best for both of you (read our guide on remote working). It is also helpful to already talk about what topics you are interested in and what you would like to talk about so that both mentee and mentor can prepare for the first meeting.
Mentors, please reach out to your mentee as soon as possible after the Kick-Off.
First meeting
The first meeting is very important for your mentoring relationship since this is where you first get to know each other and lay the groundwork for future sessions.
This meeting can be flexible, you can talk about yourselves, your hobbies and of course the mentee's challenges and how the mentor can help best to address them.
The goal of this meeting should be to finalize the mentor-mentee-agreement below which helps you in defining your goals for this program.
During the meeting and while filling out this form you should answer questions like:
What are the mentee's key challenges which they want to address?
What is the mentors relevant expertise to address these issues?
What goals do you want to set for the end of the program in 6 months?
How do you want to give feedback?
How often do you want to meet in the future and when?
We ask mentees to think about these questions in advance and already fill out the form before your first meeting with your mentor. A successful mentoring relationship needs clearly defined goals which is why you should already prepare answers to some of the questions above.
Here you can download the mentor-mentee-agreement form.
See our sources page for helpful resources this information is based on.
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