Mentor and Mentee: A Mutually Beneficial Partnership

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

  Career Development   New Practitioners  

An established project manager has a great deal to offer an organization—not the least of which is their ability to mentor newer members of the profession and teach them how to practice their skills in an active work environment.

While being asked to be a mentor is a great recognition of one’s abilities, it is a position of responsibility that also needs to be evaluated on many levels by each individual PM to determine how ready they are for the exercise. Becoming a mentor may mean something like creating a simple collaboration between colleagues, but within a corporate climate that operates with more formal guidelines, there is often a stronger level of commitment that can require additional work to stay compliant with protocol and processes.

Being a mentee is an honor as well. It is an acknowledgment by the mentor (and the sponsoring organization) of the current ability of an individual and recognition of their future possibilities. Matched up with the right expert, a great opportunity is provided to learn from the mentor’s experience and gain a modicum of their knowledge—as well as build a lasting relationship that could help the mentee with project questions and needs as time moves on.

Before either party makes a collaborative agreement however, it is important that the mentor and mentee consider what common ground they will cover and the …

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