A closer look at the 8 P's of mentoring

As many of you will already know, the main speaker at out our mentor training session was Dr Adadevoh (founder and president of the International Leadership Foundation - ILF). Dr Adadevoh has extensive knowledge on the subject of leadership, mentoring and development (as development spins off good leadership). You can find a short clip of a speech he gave at a UN Breakfast Summit after the cut (from the ILF website). He kindly agreed to host this session for the second year running. Both times, he spoke extensively on the 8 P's of mentoring, and I want to draw a little attention to them. First of all, I will give you a brief recap on what the 8 P's are:

• Purpose
• Personal assessment
• Potential
• Problem formulation
  
• Principles for change
• Plan of action
  
• Partnerships
  
• Progress tracking

All these things are central to the YLMP mentoring process, and indeed to any mentor-mentee relationship. At Databank Foundation, we believe in giving our mentors the freedom to decide how their mentoring is going to run. There are, however, a few things that we ask that you all do. I will take each in turn to illustrate this.

Purpose can refer to two things - the purpose (or destiny) of your mentee or the purpose of your mentoring relationship. We believe that every individual is made with a God-given purpose, and truly successful mentoring will help mentees uncover this purpose. The purpose of the mentoring relationship is broadly to develop leadership qualities, but of course you are free to engage in other objectives as well. These can be documented in the YLMP Progress Appraisal Form.

Personal assessment is an ongoing process that focuses on discovering gifts, talents, strengths and weaknesses. These are bound to come up in many discussions you have, so I will not go into them now.

Potential is based on purpose and personal assessment. A life mission can be formulated from these two things. All mentors are required to have some sort of discussion about this with their mentees - a cheat sheet will be provided for this.

Problem formulation and Principles for change deal with identifying the things that prevent mentees from achieving their potential, and working out what needs to change in order to overcome these barriers. Both are central to the Appraisal Form.

A Plan of action will also be formulated in the Appraisal Form in the form of specific, time based deliverables.

Partnerships are formed as soon as you enter the mentoring relationship (senior mentor, Junior mentors, mentees, Databank Foundation), and Progress tracking is engaged in throughout the year.

Here's the video I mentioned earlier: