Begin at the Start
To give the mentoring partnership the greatest chance of moving the human story forward, we’d like you to begin at the start. Please tell us who you are, your motivation for doing what you do, your career objectives and your altruistic aspirations to make our planet a better place. Once we’ve suggested someone for you to pair with, please read each other’s answers before you have your introductory talk. We’d like to be clear from the beginning, that our intention is for both mentors and mentees to learn and benefit from this experience.
Grant Agency
We want to empower you both to use your mentoring paring as a vehicle of change, to break free from the everyday to explore new avenues. For example, once paired, consider sharing your interests outside your main scientific focus/academic study if you are a scientist to explore beyond your immediate scientific interest. You never know how you might bring a shared and unlikely interest into your individual mentoring pairing. Further to 3 sessions, please clearly define (if there is a change from your original mutually agreed mentoring focus) the objectives of your pairing. Please confirm this in writing. Please cc ideaXme. A reminder, please ensure what you agree, that is the output, has the potential to Move the human story forward™.
Whilst, both mentor and mentee will have different levels of experience, please avoid hierarchy.
Prioritise Altruism
Innovation for innovation’s sake does not serve our planet. So, in creating your co-innovation, ideaXme asks you to co-innovate with an altruistic objective. For example, if you are a PhD student with a specialisation in x, y, z and z aspect of your work, consider exploring that aspect of your work with your mentee/mentor.
Be Humble and Open Minded
Being precious about your work and ideas is not a good way to elicit meaningful collaboration. You should be open to suggestions and feedback for how to improve both the collaboration and your role in it. Sometimes this feedback might be unwarranted or hard to hear, especially if it is related to something that you have tried to account for. However, creating a space in which you encourage constructive criticisms and supportive reflections will help to foster trust across the collaboration. We believe that being humble means that you should take responsibility for the collaboration, that you should own any mistakes, and that you should commit to learning from these for the benefit of both the collaboration and your own development.
Encourage Evolution
Once the immediate objectives of the mentoring pairing are realised, your professional connection need not stop. Rather, we encourage your connection with each other to continuously evolve, both within and beyond the framework of this initiative. Please come back and update us on how your connection is progressing beyond your original objectives and when you are no longer with the ideaXme programme.
Create Touchpoints
In any collaboration, which includes mentoring, there are bound to be a series of outputs, and in order for these to be co-created in a manner that is beneficial to all partners, we believe that there is a necessity for clear and regular communications between both mentor and mentee. Organising a series of regular catch ups will help to ensure that mentors and mentees are working towards a similar goal in a manner that is both effective and respectful. Long periods of time when you are not in touch will hinder progressing your objectives. Please ensure that you check in with ideaXme at least every 2 months to let us know how you are both getting on. Moreover, let us know how we can help, if require.
Listen
The final, and most important point of this manifesto is to listen. Listen to one another. Do not assume what others want, ask them what they need. Create space and opportunities for listening to the needs of each other and make it clear that all voices are both valued and necessary.
Evaluation
………..how to determine success
