Dennis Dowdell On Mentoring (Section 4)

When you're mentoring someone in a corporate environment, what do you try to get across?

One [thing] is to establish just an open dialogue about careers. What do careers mean, and how do you evaluate your career. There are times when you might have a mentee, and I've had this happen, where you tell them it's time to leave that company. Just time to leave. It's not a fit. I think secondly a degree of openness and honesty and trustworthiness has to evolve in a meaningful relationship, particularly in corporate America because individual office cultures are different, but the themes are the same--balancing work and family, moving up, how to read your boss or the CEO. Those kinds of different things I think are very important. We often forget, I think, as we're moving up that our boss may have the same kinds of pressures that we may feel. They may be being just passed down or they may be more intense.

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