Mentoring someone is a lot of fun, very rewarding, something you can be proud of. And if you do it wrong, you can really screw someone up for life.

When we talk about mentoring we mean something more formal than just giving someone advice, but less formal than a manager-employee relationship. In fact, it is probably best if you do not mentor the people whose performance reports you write or whose pay you control; this can lead to problems I will touch on in a moment. That is not to say you should not help develop the people who work directly for you, but if you are offering guidance on how to deal with problems in the workplace, it is best if you are not one of those problems.

Mentors tend to be someone in a similar field with a bit more experience and a desire to share that experience with someone else. If the person youa’re going to mentor is a potential competitor of yours in the workplace, you might want to think twice…mentoring and career sabotage do not mix well. Instead, find someone with similar interests, maybe someone who reminds you of you when you were “that age” (though they might only be a couple years younger), and who is going to follow behind you on the career track, or maybe on a parallel or somewhat divergent path. Your experience needs to be relevant to be useful.

You should have regular meetings with your mentee. This does not need to be formal, does not need to be documented, and can happen with a regularity of your choosing…some people prefer weekly, others look for monthly chats, but whatever the frequency there should be some consistency. It might be good if afterwards you wrote some notes to yourself so you can follow-up on isssues later or get answers to any questions that arose, but nothing that would be stuck into an employee’s personnel file. If possible, do it away from the workplace…try to avoid any sense of “employer-employee”-ness creeping in.

Mentoring is a great opportunity to take the lessons you have learned and help someone else apply them. One thing to avoid, though, is too much of the “if I knew then what I know now” syndrome. Don’t take someone 10 years junior to you and try to make a clone of who you are now. You got where you are through your collected experiences, and they need to do the same. Explain mistakes you made, discuss opportunities you wish you had taken advantage of, but do not try to re-live your life through your mentee. Help them take advantage of the opportunities open to them, help guide them around and over the challenges they face…their life is different from yours and you need to give them the tools, not try to build a replica of your house for them.

Oh, and don’t try to date your mentee. Seriously. Bad karma.