Mentoring
As the world becomes increasingly competitive, people have lesser time for others. In yesteryears older relatives or bosses had some time spare and used it to mentor or coach younger people. Today, every person is pre-occupied with his/her own work and the message seems to be: ' Find your path - don't expect any help from me. Once I am done with my work, then perhaps if I am not too tired I can help you. Please don't call on Sundays, evenings and long weekends."

In short, people are too caught up with their own struggles and cannot really offer their time for others' development.

Perhaps, the only instance where such mentoring takes place is amongst friends, a rare boss-subordinate relationship and so on.

So, what is mentoring?

Mentoring is the process of building a mutually beneficial partnership between mentor and mentee to help develop the mentee's skills, behaviors and insights to reach his/her goals and in which the mentor has no stake in the outcomes other than the satisfaction of developing a meaningful relationship.

The original Mentor is a character in Homer's epic poem The Odyssey. When Odysseus, King of Ithaca went to fight in the Trojan War, he entrusted the care of his kingdom to Mentor. Mentor served as the teacher and overseer of Odysseuss' son, Telemachus.

Mentoring programmes are about guidance and facilitation rather than formal training. Mentoring is when a role model, or mentor, offers support to another person. A mentor has knowledge and experience in an area and facilitates understanding in the person being mentored.

Given that Mentoring and being a mentee are voluntary rather than mandated processes, our goal is to set up and ensure that the Mentoring process is one which is self-sustaining, and not one which needs to be controlled by any part of the organization.