Ideally, every mentoring meeting will have an agenda set beforehand. Even better is if this agenda is shared between mentee and mentor ahead of time. 

Investing as little as ten minutes in setting an agenda and sharing it with your mentoring partner will make your time spent together far more valuable. 

The onus is usually on the mentee to be proactive by creating the mentoring meeting agenda. This takes the pressure off the mentor to “dig around” for topics to discuss and keeps the meeting focused on the areas of development. 

We’ve prepared six templates for your mentoring meetings, based on a six month mentoring partnership, where mentor and mentee are meeting once per month.

Use this as a starting point. Of course, there needs to be room for flexibility. Sometimes the conversation will veer off in interesting and valuable directions. 

First Meeting

Purpose: This meeting is to build rapport and set expectations.

Agenda:

1. Set the parameters: Talk about how often you're available to meet, how you prefer to communicate, etc.
2. Give each other a more in-depth overview of your experience and career highlights
3. Goals: Why are you here? More mentee and mentor to share why there are taking part in mentoring
4. Make sure you come away with a clear idea of what your mentee is looking for so you can start planning how you can best guide them.

Second Meeting

Purpose: This meeting will start addressing the mentee’s mentoring objectives, which were established in the previous meeting.

Agenda:

1. Optional Icebreaker: What are you passionate about, outside of work? 
2. Updates from mentee on their progress since the previous meeting
3. Revisit mentee goals in more detail - What are they trying to achieve? What is the desired outcome?
4. Discussion on how to address the goal - brainstorming ways forward

Third Meeting

Purpose: This meeting will allow you to delve further into the mentor’s experience

Agenda: 

1. Optional Icebreaker: Who do you admire or look up to as a role model?
2. Updates from mentee on their progress since the previous meeting
3. How did you land your current role?
4. Think back to five years ago. Did you envision this is where you would be?
5. How did you build the skill of ___(mentor skill)___ ?
6. What’s the most important leadership lesson you’ve learned?

Fourth Meeting

Purpose: This meeting is to discuss what could be holding the mentee and discuss approaches to risk and failure.

Agenda: 

1. Updates from mentee on their progress since the previous meeting
2. Optional Icebreaker: Tell me about a recent challenge you faced?
3. How do we each embrace failure?
4. Review your goals. What assumptions or biases may be involved in reaching it?

Tip: These might sound like I’m not ____ enough to _____. 

5. How could we circumvent those?

Fifth Meeting

Purpose: This meeting allows the mentor to provide constructive feedback. The questions invite your mentor to contribute to the mentee’s self-awareness. 

Agenda: 

1. Optional Icebreaker: What did you want to be when you were growing up? 
2. Updates from mentee on their progress since the previous meeting
3. What other new skills do I need to move ahead? What are my blind spots? 
4. What do you see as my strengths?
5. How do you think others perceive me?

Final Meeting

Purpose: This meeting is to reflect on what you've learned, say thank you, and make sure you and you are on the same page about what happens next.

Agenda: 

1. Reflect on the mentorship—what have we each learned?
2. Review goals. Did you meet those goals? How were you successful? How were you unsuccessful?
3. What did the mentor get out of the conversations?
4. Talk about the future— would like to stay in contact? If so, how?
5. Any parting advice?
6. Thank each other and acknowledge each other’s contributions