1:1 Mentorship Framework

1:1 Mentorship Framework Rationale

Very few people work in isolation, so fostering a culture where talking about each individual's personal growth and their approach to work is key to the success of the team as a whole. Having regular 1:1s with both the people you report to and those who report to you is a vital part of this growth.

Key Considerations

Both parties in this relationship need to be active participants in this process. A distracted or disinterested mentor will not be of much help, and an untrusting mentee will only regret being forced to spend this time in a session they see no value in.

Fostering trust and ensuring you are truly there to listen to and meaningfully engage with your mentees is vital to the success of the relationship.

Structural Outline

There are three core components to this framework. Each builds on the previous step, providing a rounded yet detailed experience for all involved:

• Constructing and sharing a Working With... document
• The initial mentorship onboarding session
• Repeat sessions

Working With Document

In preparation of the Mentorship programme, the first step is to create a Working With... document. This contains various questions covering the history of the mentee, as well as their preferred ways of working. It's a reflective process that will provide a solid foundation to future sessions.

The mentor should provide their own WW document as part of the brief. 1:1s are a two way conversation, so any sharing of information should go both ways.

Time investment: 1-2 hours

Onboarding Session

The onboarding session is specifically crafted to create a platform for the ongoing sessions that follow. This should allow both participants to get a better sense of how they will work together and achieve alignment on what the expected goals and outcomes of the sessions should be.

Time investment: 1.5 hours

Repeat Sessions

These follow a standard flow of questions, ostensibly as a catchup of what has happened since the last session and re-orienting future goals as a result. These sessions must also include any new agenda items beforehand, as there should be discussion outside of the standard question set.

Time investment: 1 hour Session cadence: 4 weeks

Preparation

Before the first call happens, the mentor should prepare the mentee regarding the overall structure and format of the programme. This can be as a Slack message explaining the three core components listed above.

Sample Message

Here is an example message you cab send via Slack or email, detailing the structure and general plan for these sessions.

Hello! Here are some notes on how these 1:1s with me will work for the next little while.

Before our first session, I'd like you to please complete a Working With... document. It's essentially a manual describing how you do your best work so that someone else, in this case me, can understand your approach to work from your point of view. I've included a blank version for you to complete, as well as mine as an example. You absolutely do not need to provide nearly as much text as mine, I'm old and set in my ways. Please let me know if you have any questions. Please have this done by DATE so I can properly read it before our first session.

The first session will be mostly a GTKY chat, so I've got some key questions that we'll go through so we can establish a baseline for what we discuss and measure against going forwards. There is some overlap with the Working With document you will have already done, but there are also questions about your goals and motivations that we won't have discussed previously.

For each subsequent call we have, I've got a set of questions that we'll cover as a general sense check for how things are going, after which we'll have a broader discussion about anything that comes up from those as well as any additional topics you want to discuss.

Please arrive at these sessions willing and able to communicate and be an active participant. Without that foundation, we won't be able to make progress together.

I do have a significant preference for cameras to be on for these sessions. I am a visual communicator and it's easier for both of us to pick up on things and have a normal conversation as if we were in a shared space together.

I'm very excited to get to know you better, and discover how I can best support you in your career!

Component Details

Working With Document

At it's core, what this document should do is make it clear what your colleagues, direct reports and managers can expect from working with you, along with framing how you would like to work with them. This can be viewed as a 'rules of engagement' document, but that phrasing carries with it an overly negative tone for me so I prefer using the Working With... label. These are often called a Personal User Manual which is also much friendlier framing.

This is a useful tool for both new and established teams to have a better understanding of the individual needs (and quirks) of each team member. As a manager it's useful to understand your staff and how they like to communicate, and your reports will in turn find it useful to understand your position on various matters and why they're important.

As with many of these things, this isn't a secret way to level up or gain favour or a Jedi mind trick to success, it's all about setting and understanding expectations. It works well if the team buys in and adopts the practice with intent. It can help underperforming teams to understand each other in a more meaningful way and it can help new teams to find their common ground much more quickly.

The basic structure of the Working With document is outlined below:

• About Me
• How to Communicate With Me
• My Preferred Working Style
• What Motivates Me
• What Demotivates Me
• My Values (and what I value in others)
• My Blind Spots
• My Pet Peeves
• What You Can Expect From Me

This portion is to be completed by the mentee in advance of the first session.

Onboarding Session

The onboarding session is designed to fill in additional gaps which the Working With does not cover. This is intentional as many of these items are more easily expressed and discussed in conversation instead of in a delivered document. This discovery process sets the tone for future interactions, and it's vital that both participants arrive being curious about each other and how they will work together. Some of these items are styled as ice breakers to help get conversation moving and to understand more about the personality and thought process of each participant. A single piece of previously unknown common ground (a shared love of iced zoo biscuits or that specific scene in Superman III) can go a long way to forging a high-functioning mentorship.

This is the overall structure for the onboarding session:

• Session Purpose
• Who are you?
• What do you do outside of work?
• What games do you play?
• What got you to here?
• Mentorship Vision
• Communication Preferences
• Strengths Inventory
• Potential Blockers
• Development Baseline
  • Where do you see gaps in your skills or experience right now? What's held you back in the past?
• Goal Calibration
• Support Mapping
• Working Rhythm
• Early Wins
  • What quick wins or early progress would make you feel good about this mentorship?
• Accountability Style
• Surprise me!
• Programme Structure Agreement
  • Session Cadence
  • Preparation Expectations
• Action Items from First Session
• Notes & Commitments
• Next Session

Typically, these questions and topics will not be circulated before the first onboarding call. It's useful to treat this as a conversation and not as a formal questionnaire so that you can find a comfortable conversational groove between you and your mentee. Feel free to rephrase these questions in an appropriate and natural style for both of you.

Repeat Sessions

The repeat sessions should build upon each other. Always review any action items from previous discussions and add new agenda items based on recent discoveries/news/feedback. The goal here is to have a set of standard touchpoints to refer back to, both as a measure of progress and to help spot trends over time. Each of these questions can spark additional conversation and should not be treated as a dry questionnaire. Again, both participants must arrive with curiosity and a willingness to actively participate in the process.

This is the overall structure for the repeating sessions:

• Agenda
• Wellness Quotient
• How are you feeling right now? Green, yellow, orange, red?
• Quandaries & Quagmires
  • What's been difficult or blocking you recently?
  • Are there any immediate actions that could help mitigate or resolve the blockages?
• Quick Calls
  • Are there any big decisions you needed to make over the last few weeks?
• Question Queue
  • Are there any upcoming decisions that you need to make that we can talk through?
• Quantum Leap
  • What skills or capabilities do you want to develop? What support do you need?
• Key Quarters
  • Do you have any upcoming goals?
  • Description and Success Criteria
• Connection Quality
  • Manager Relationship
  • Team Dynamics
• Quantifiable Wins
  • What recent successes should we acknowledge?
• Additional Questions
• Action Items
• Quirky Pursuits
  • What are you Reading/Watching/Playing/Listening To? Any new interests or obsessions? Sparkers of joy? Doom pit dwellers?
• Next Session

These questions should be revealed in advance of the second session, as there should be a good amount of pre-thought applied by the mentee. They should be actively engaging in this process by having a fairly good idea of what the answer to each of these will be for each session. This set of questions typically remains the same each session, however it is permissible to skip some if there is a specific topic that requires a deeper discussion. For example, setting new goals should not be a priority for every session, so treat that section as more of a progress check-in where appropriate. Similarly, if someone is an avid reader but never listens to music, there's no need to always prompt them for what they're listening to.

1:1 Mentorship Templates

I use Obsidian for all of my internal notes and documentation. These templates have been simplified slightly to remove the automations that require additional plugins. Feel free to modify these for your own purposes, either from the outset or as your sessions progress and you find the right questions to be asking the individuals within your organisation.

• 1:1 Intro
• 1:1 Session

Closing

While it probably appears at first glance that this is a lot of detail and planning and reading and effort, yes it is in fact all of those things. This is intentional. We want to be able to support our mentees as much as possible, and this framework takes away a lot of the unknowns by providing a set starting point for all interactions. As you work with each mentee, you may need to adapt the phrasing or framing of some of the questions to get to the level of interaction you need in order to provide them with adequate support.

As mentioned multiple times above, active participation from both parties is the key to success here. You should be able to have difficult and honest conversations with your mentees without them feeling attacked. They should feel comfortable enough to open up and share their difficulties with you. If you trust each other, this becomes easier.

Also remember to invite feedback from your mentees on this process and make any adjustments that feel right for your relationship. If you are also in the mentee's direct line of reporting, you should be inviting feedback on how you can work better together as well. This could in the form of start/stop/continue or a general bit of housekeeping and pointing back at the originally shared Working With documents.