ABSTRACT
Mentors can from time to time provide access to powerful others from whom the mentee can benefit, but this approach is relatively rare in European developmental mentoring and is often frowned upon as being corrosive of equal opportunity (Megginson, 2000). Instead, building support and influence is best seen as a task for the mentee, and we offer a framework technique for this in the first section, called Fitting into the mentee’s network. We describe a technique based around Revans’ questions, and give a case study of its use. Peter Matthews, of Ernst & Young, offers a technique that he calls Who would want to network with me? because he finds people are inhibited from networking for their own purposes by a deeply held belief about needing to be helpful to others rather than have them help you. We also present a model from our own work, on motivation for networking.
