Q. What is mentoring?
A. Mentoring is about helping others develop in a positive way and more effectively. It is a relationship designed to build confidence and support the mentee so that they are able to take control of their own development and progress. It is trust-based and confidential and should help people to feel valued, represented, productive, self-fulfilled and rewarded;
Q. What is the difference between Mentoring and Coaching?
A. There are a number of differences between mentoring and coaching however the main difference centres around the type of support given.
- Coaching provides guidance and a framework for growth and development. Often a coach is employed to support someone new to a senior role, helping to provide the tools they need to navigate the new world they find themselves in and improve their performance.
- Mentoring is a relationship built on trust which looks to develop the mentee for the future, here the mentee is supported in being able to find their own way to achieve the goals they have set themselves.
Q. What is your mentoring model?
A. Mentoring has evolved over the years, the original mentors were there to guide you though your career. These days mentoring is much more about supporting the mentee to develop themselves, and is know as developmental mentoring. Developmental mentoring emerged in Europe in the 1980s as a process for empowering others to take charge of their own development.
Q. Who benefits from Mentoring?
The obvious answer to this question is the mentee, who will learn to develop in a positive way through a trusted relationship with their mentor. But benefits also extend to the mentor and to organisations and employers. Mentors care able to benefit be growing their skills and realising they have the capability to add real value for others, sometimes we forget that the skills and expertise we had should be shared.
Research carried out by McKinsey & Co has shown that companies with the greatest gender diversity on their executive teams are 21% more likely to outperform peers on profitability and 27% more likely to create superior value. However, according to a global survey by leadership advisory firm Egon Zehnder, nearly half of women report not having access to the kind of senior leaders who could serve as effective mentors.
Formal mentoring programs help organisations retain employees, increase job satisfaction and commitment, and cultivate organisational values and behaviours. When done right, mentoring helps people take positive steps forward in their careers—which also helps develop the talent pool for that organisation.
Having a diversity of mentors as well as a diversity of mentees, such as provided by Mentors for Women, can expand a person’s perspectives, and help them grow more intentionally and effectively. Mentoring that crosses lines in both directions in all sorts of ways…race, ethnicity and national origin, sexual and gender identity, age, ability, class background, etc. is so much more powerful.
Mentor/mentee relationships do not need to echo traditional privilege structures or go only one way across lines of difference; we all have so much to learn from each other, we all have stories to share about how we bring our full selves to work, how we succeed and thrive, how we achieve results, and we all can do better by learning from those stories.
Q How do I contact Mentors for Women?
A There are three ways in which you can contact us:
Membership
Q. What sort of memberships are available?
A. Currently we offer a standard membership and a student membership which is half the price of our standard membership. Corporate membership is also available for organisations. Take a look here
Q, Why do I need a Mentor?
A. Mentoring is about helping others to develop in a positive and more effective way. It is a relationship designed to build confidence and support the person being mentored, (mentee} enabling them to take control of their own development and progress. It is trust-based and confidential, helping people to feel valued, self-fulfilled and rewarded. Women often find it hard to engage a mentor and this impacts their ability to climb the career ladder. We have some interesting studies about this on our website.
You may not need a mentor all the time, but there will be times in your career where it is very helpful, then where do you go?
Q. Why should I join if I am not looking for a Mentor?
A. Our vision is very much about creating a space where we can share our stories and our experience, providing women with a platform to share, which will in turn inspire or help someone else. We would love our space to become a one stop shop for resources, help and ideas, as well as a showcase for our work and achievements. Being a member allows you to contribute to that. The website is currently open to all, that may change in the future, with some elements only open to members. Currently being a member will give you reduced rates for training, and we have an awesome programme for training for all members to participate in, not just mentors.
Q. Why do you charge for membership?
A. We charge because we aim to provide a service to women from all walks of life, and at all stages of their lives. We view Mentors for Women as a place where women can enhance their skills and find the right mentor at a specific points in their careers or their lives. We are not aligned to any other organisation, nor do we receive any funding, and it costs money to provide the service. We decided to provide a more magazine-style interface for our members, providing other places to learn from and helpful links to other organisations. Mentors for Women is a space to grow and a place to learn, our aim is to become a community, the place to go for women and we very much want our members to contribute.
Q. Why do I have to pay for my mentor?
A. Mentoring may be part of an organisation’s offering to their staff and there is informal mentoring that happens on a day-to-day basis, but often an offer to mentor has no proper boundaries around it and no real objectives to check its effectiveness. It can easily fall off the end of someone’s to-do list simply because of the pressure of their day-to-day job, both on the side of the mentor and the mentee. Mentors for Women wants to make sure both parties are committed to a positive outcome and one way to do that is to set up a contract between two people. Our mentoring contract does just that and the exchange of money completes the contract. Both the mentor and the mentee are vested in a positive outcome.
We are also committed to putting some of the profits we make each year into a Women’s Foundation we are creating, which supports women who cannot afford to pay for mentoring. Read about our journey to set this up on the website.
We have a package available for corporate organisations which includes the mentoring fee, and we see this as an opportunity for organisations to provide mentoring on a more formal footing. Why not ask you HR department or manager if they would be interested in joining for you?
Q. Does the mentor receive all the money I pay?
A. Mentors for Women has overheads, the running and development costs of the company. To be successful we want to continue to develop our service and the membership system we have designed, and that costs money. The subscriptions cover part of this but will not allow us to grow. The fee includes VAT and Mentors for Women take 20% of the remaining fee.
Some mentors have chosen not to receive their fee, in which case their fee will go directly into the Women’s Foundation we are setting up, to support women who cannot afford to pay for mentoring and to support women centric projects. Find out about our progress in setting that up the foundation on the website.
Q. What if I get a system error?
A. If you experience a system error please contact us by email at here and attach a screen print or a description of the issue including any error codes.
Q. How do I find a Mentor?
A. The drop-down menu has an option Find a Mentor. Simply click on that and you will see three boxes; one for skills, one for sectors, one for name, just in case you know who you want!.
You will be provided with a list of mentors and by clicking on a name you will see an overview of that mentor. Once you have found someone you think might be a fit, you can click on the Select button below their name. They will then appear in the section above the choices box, called Selected Mentors. Take your time, you can always Deselect if you find a better fit. You are allowed to go forward with three for an initial chat.
We appreciate this may take a few days, but when you have finished click on the Confirm my three choices box.
Once you have made your choice, we will email the chosen mentors and they will contact you by email to arrange a 15 minute “get to know you” session. Have your questions ready to make the most of that time, and once you have had the sessions go back into the system and make your choice. Enter a start date for your chosen mentor and enter end-dates for those you didn’t choose together with some feedback.
Once in a relationship, you should make sure that you keep the mentoring record up to date, with meeting dates, when they were completed, as well as an update on objectives, and whether or not the mentoring need was met, or even changed.
Q. Why do I have to give feedback?
A. Feedback is really important for our mentors to help them to understand how they can improve. As well as giving feedback to those mentors who were not the right fit, we want both the mentor and mentee to give each other feedback at the end of the process. It is part of the reflection process, always seeking to improve. It is the mentee’s responsibility to enter the feedback for both parties as they own the mentoring record.
Q. Why has my Mentor not contacted me?
A. Your mentor should contact you within 2 weeks of your decision to proceed with the relationship. If you have any queries, please contact us here.
Q. What happens if I want to delete my account?
A. Should you decide you no longer want to be part of Mentors for Women and your membership is allowed to lapse, your account will remain on the system as a non-member. If you wish to delete your account altogether, please send us your details here and we will delete your account. We are obliged to keep financial information for several years for audit purposes, but we will deactivate your account and anonymise your data until such time as it can be legally deleted.
Q. How do I join?
A. Joining is simple. Click here to go to the Membership Page. Once you have paid your membership fee, you don’t have to put all your information in straight away. You can return to complete your profile later by signing into your account and updating or amending at your leisure.
Things to remember:
- Find a good photo of yourself.
- When filling in the details of who you are and what you have done, try to show a little of the essence of yourself.
For example:
“I am a big believer in family and friends. I worry about things over which I have absolutely no control. I sometimes take silly risks. When I am angry in a situation where I feel out of control it often comes out as tears.”
You should not be afraid to show a bit of who you are if you want to help people or for people to help you. It’s an opportunity for the mentors and mentees to gain a bit of an understanding about you before they meet with you.
Visit the website often. If you have something to say or share, get in touch and we will try make it possible. Let’s make this place a fun place as well as a useful place. Email us here anytime you want. Keep in touch.
Once you have clicked on that tab you will see the following screen.
Look at the highlighted box saying Enrol which you should click on to be taken immediately into the enrolment program seen below.
Outlined here are the simple processes you need to follow.
- Fill out the Mentor Profile page on the Apply to be a Mentor Tab. This is where you will also need to upload your Mentor CV in PDF format if you have one.
- If you have no CV, then make sure there is a little more detail on you experience etc, on the personal profile page instead.
- If you have a personal DBS clearance you can choose to upload a copy of your clearance, as evidence, onto your Mentor Profile page. Once you have completed you profile, you come back in here to update the system to say it is complete.
- The next stage is to complete the Webinar Training, which is accessed from the menu in the membership system, there is also a short questionnaire to complete. There are two training webinars to complete and You MUST complete the questionnaire for each. It doesn’t take very long, and we will advise you of your score by email. You can then upload your score on the page above.
- The final stage will be a meeting with your Mentor Manager, who will already have reviewed your page, and will provide feedback if needed. The Mentor Manager will get in touch with you to arrange a virtual meeting. The conversation will mainly be about your experience and what level you will operate at, and therefore agreeing the charge for your time. Make sure you have looked at the Competencies, so you have some idea of where you fit. We have built the system so that mentors can use a range of rates, depending on their experience.
- It is the mentor’s responsibility to agree the rate from your range which is most appropriate to the mentee at your short meeting. The mentee will enter that rate into their mentoring record when they engage you as a mentor. Remember all rates include VAT, and MfW take 20% towards overheads. If you have a VAT number, you will need to provide us with that at the mentor meeting, then we can ensure that we pay you including VAT.
You can access your certification record as often as you need. When you complete sections, we are notified and approve each section. The screen below shows what it looks like on your account page when you have certification in progress. you can see it says View Progress where the enrol box was, simply click on View Progress and it will take you to the detail screen.
Once you are enrolled and your start date agreed, you will have a tab which says Mentor Profile instead of Apply to be a Mentor. Keep your profile up to date. Remember if you want to pause mentoring for any reason, you can contact us to do so. We will make that available for mentors to change in a future release. Once live on the system, when members search for a mentor, you will appear in their list to review when you match their criteria. They can click on your name to review your details, which looks like the picture below. It does not show any personal data, but they can download your PDF CV, so make sure it is appropriate, with no personal information or corporate logos on it. Likewise, when you get an email to say that you have be chosen by a mentee for a short chat, you can go into the system and pull up a similar page about that member by clicking on Find a Mentee and entering their name. This should help you prepare for your short meeting.
Q. I am under 18 can I join?
A. For safeguarding reasons we do not currently have members who are under the age of 18.
Q. Do I have to be a woman to join?
A. Whilst Mentors for Women has been designed specifically with women in mind, it is not a requirement to be of the female gender.
Q. What do I do if I find I can’t get on with my mentor?
A. We hope that having the opportunity to meet with three mentors before you make a decision will mean that you can find someone that suits you from the start, however we recognise that there may be times when you simply do not work as a mentor / mentee relationship. That’s why we will sort out a no blame end to the relationship. Please talk to your mentor in the first instance about your concerns, to see if it can be rectified. If you both agree it will not work, then agree between you who give contact us so that we can work through the process to end the relationship.
Q. Are all your mentors DBS checked
A. Currently we do not require our mentors go through a DBS check. Mentors who have undergone a personal DBS check can upload their certification in the membership system. We currently do not plan to provide a service to people under the age of 18 or vulnerable adults. All mentors go through an interview process, they cannot just sign up to become a mentor without speaking to a Mentor Manager. We believe this process will provide enough of a safeguard for our adult members. If you are concerned in any way about a mentor, please contact us immediately.
Q. What do I do if I don’t believe the mentee is who they purport to be?
A. If you believe that someone is for example under the age of 18, or that something about a member does not ring true, please contact us here.
