SPECIAL SESSION: How to Build a Successful Mentoring Relationship

Description/Overview: Mentoring is a strategy to support retention, succession planning, job satisfaction and role enhancement. It is an approach that enables individuals to engage in conversations and relationships directed at enhancing career satisfaction, professional development and ultimately practice. Mentoring offers many benefits to both mentors and mentees including improved confidence and autonomy in one’s role, increased productivity, the development of new knowledge and skills and enhanced networking and inter-professional collaboration. A successful mentoring relationship is founded on mutual trust, shared values, interests, and commitment. It is a complex process and its success is largely dependent on the care taken to build it. The quality of the relationship has a significant effect on achieving mentoring outcomes. Successful mentoring relationships require investing time to understand the why and the how of the mentoring relationship and commitment of time for ongoing focused interaction and reflection. Having a clear career goal that a mentor can help the mentee to achieve or that can be fulfilled by being a mentor is the first step in a successful mentoring relationship. Despite the significantly positive impacts and benefits that mentoring relationships can have, few know how to enter into and establish a mentoring relationship. Building a successful mentoring relationship is a learned skill that can be developed and sustained for both mentors and mentees. In 2007, the authors developed The Five Phase Mentoring Relationship Model (MRM), together with tools to support successful mentoring relationships for an inter-professional e-Mentorship program. Since then the MRM has been used extensively with individuals and organizations as a framework for informal mentorship relationships and formal mentorship programs. This presentation will describe the MRM (purpose, engagement, planning, emergence, and completion) and take participants through each of the phases answering such questions as Why do I want a mentor? How can I find a mentor? How will we work together? How can I achieve my goals? How am I doing? What are we learning? and What are my next steps?