Introduction: Matching Mentors and Protégés

by Barry Sweeny, 2003

Typically, during recruitment a protégé has been asked for information that would help the organization, and specifically the mentoring program leaders, to identify:

1. The protege's areas of strength as a professional
2. The protege's possible areas of need for further professional growth
3. The protege's preferences for the kind of person with whom you'd like to work as a protégé or for a role model
4. The protege's office/work location
5. The protege's job assignment or the future assignment for which you are being prepared.
6. Other factors which might influence matching with a prospective and appropriate mentor.

These and other areas should be or have been considered in matching the protege's to a mentor. However, it is also very likely that the mentor does not possess all the qualities the protege sought or that the program sought.

Theoretically, a mentor would have professional and personal strengths in the areas in which the protege wants or will need to grow.

In practice however, the people who should be mentors, are also some of the busiest and most involved people around. Also, for a wide variety of reasons, it may be a physical impossibility for one person to possess all that is needed to support the protege. That is not a comment on the scale of the protege's needs so much as it may be about the current availability of people whose professional and personal lives are very complicated. It may also be a function of the size of an organization, numbers of persons at a location or in a department, or other factors, many of which may be unknown.

A mentoring team should be assigned when one person cannot be found with all the qualities that the protege will need. When this is done, usually one team member will know the specifics of the job assignment the protege has, while another may know more about local or departmental procedures, culture and traditions, etc. A manager may be viewed as a part of the mentoring team as well.

Of course when one mentor can be found, that is simpler and requires less coordination, than does mentoring by a team of people. However, when there is a team approach to mentoring, there still should be one "mentor of record" to ensure that the protege's needs are appropriately met by the team.

If some of these practices are not done in your case, you might be the very person to help your mentoring program realize what they need to do to better address protégé needs. Start by sharing the information you have found here with people in the mentoring program. Help them to understand from a protégé's perspective why the missing practices would be an improvement and should be done. Challenge them to adopt best practices. If all else fails, ask them what can be done in your own case to better address your situation and support the protege's professional growth.