Date · Wednesday, 6 May 2026, 20:30 CEST
Hosted by · UN Women and IOM
Session page · UNOG learning
Speakers
- Silvia Märkli García · HR Officer, UN Women (New York HQ) · Bio
- Virginie Ferré Sanchez-Macagno · Learning and Development Trainer, UNOG (Geneva) · Bio
Mentoring relationships have been shown to improve staff productivity, engagement, and retention, and can be a decisive and enriching part of a person’s career, whether providing or receiving mentoring. For all staff, whether you are a supervisor, have specific expertise, or a particular specialty, developing your ability to act as a mentor and hold mentoring conversations in your workplace or networks is a powerful leadership behaviour that fosters individual growth and contributes to more inclusive, empowering, and productive work environments.
This session offers a practical step-by-step process, along with concrete guidance and actions on how to conduct effective mentoring conversatio…
Key takeaways
- Anyone can be a mentor. Junior staff mentoring senior colleagues on digital topics is already common practice. Do not wait until you feel senior enough, ask yourself what you could help someone else with right now.
- When contacting a potential mentor, the message must be brief, specific, and include a clear hook: why this person, and what you want to explore. Generic messages get ignored. Also make clear you are asking for a light, bounded commitment, one conversation, not a long-term arrangement.
- Confidentiality must be established explicitly at the start of any mentoring conversation, including informal ones. Without it, the mentee will not open up, and misunderstandings about what can be shared with others become likely.
- As a mentor, ask permission before sharing your own experience. “Can I share something from my own career?” signals that the space is still the mentee’s, not yours.
- Every mentoring conversation should close with concrete actions and a commitment check. The learning happens after the conversation, not during it.
- You can have multiple mentors for different needs. technical skills, career direction, navigating organisational culture. There is no rule that says one person must cover everything.
- The hardest step for a mentee is reaching out. Once you do, people are generally generous. If the objective is clear and the message is well-crafted, the door usually opens.
Virginie Ferré Sanchez-Macagno
Virginie led the instructional core of the session and opened with a reframing that challenged common assumptions: anyone can be a mentor, regardless of seniority. She described reverse mentoring, where junior staff mentor senior colleagues on digital topics, as something already in practice at organisations she has worked with. This matters practically because it lowers the barrier for people who feel they don’t yet have enough experience or standing to offer mentoring. The question she posed to participants, “What could you help someone else with?”, was itself a demonstration of the kind of reflective prompt a mentor might use.
She gave structured guidance on finding and approaching a mentor. The starting point is clarifying your own objective: are you looking for someone to help you navigate organisational systems, develop technical skills, gain confidence, or think through career direction? You can have multiple mentors for different needs. The mentor does not have to be a senior colleague or a hierarchical superior, peers, former managers, and contacts made through LinkedIn or even in personal contexts (a gym, a parents’ group) are all valid. When reaching out, the key is a brief, specific message that makes your purpose clear and includes what Virginie called the “hook”, a single compelling reason the other person might want to engage. She also advised proposing a light, time-limited commitment upfront (one conversation, not a programme) and always closing the message professionally, regardless of the response.
In the role-play, Virginie demonstrated several concrete practices as a mentor: establishing confidentiality and psychological safety explicitly at the outset; using open-ended questions (how, when, why) to keep the mentee doing the thinking; paraphrasing to confirm understanding; asking permission before sharing personal experience (“Can I share something from my own career path?”); and closing with concrete actions and a 1-to-10 commitment check. She also introduced a practical model for mentors who feel uncertain in the role: think in terms of the mentee’s current state, their desired future state, and the gap between the two. The mentor’s job is to help close that gap.
Silvia Märkli García
Silvia opened with a definition of mentoring and a comparison with related interventions. What distinguishes mentoring from coaching, counselling, and consulting is the sharing of personal experience. Coaches don’t give their own opinion; consultants solve technical problems; counsellors address psychological and emotional needs. Mentoring occupies a distinct space: voluntary, confidential, experience-led, and focused on helping the mentee identify their own path and move towards action. One element is common to all four: confidentiality, which creates the safety required for honest conversation.
She outlined a 7-step mentoring conversation cycle, establish trust, align expectations, listen actively, foster self-reflection, share experiences, define concrete actions, evaluate learning, and noted that active listening and confidentiality are not stages but constants that run through all of them. A practical point: mentees often feel they owe the mentor something in return. Silvia’s view is that this is unnecessary, because the conversation itself prompts the mentor to reflect, and that is already a return. If a mentee has something useful to offer, they can mention it at the close, but it should never feel obligatory.
In the mentee role during the role-play, Silvia illustrated what a career transition conversation looks like from the inside: acknowledging uncertainty and the difficulty of prioritising among multiple directions; recognising that the problem is not a lack of experience but a lack of narrative clarity; and arriving, through the conversation, at two concrete next steps, working on her professional narrative and seeking feedback from two trusted contacts on how others perceive her strengths.
Frameworks and models
| Name | What it stands for | How to use it |
|---|---|---|
| 7-Step Mentoring Conversation Cycle | Establish trust, align expectations, listen actively, foster self-reflection, share experiences with permission, define concrete actions, evaluate learning | Use as a guide for structuring a mentoring conversation, especially useful for first-time mentors. Active listening and confidentiality are constants across all steps, not stages |
| How to Approach a Mentor | Outreach structure for the first message to a potential mentor: clarify your objective first, look beyond hierarchy, brief specific message with the “hook”, propose a light bounded commitment | Use when reaching out to anyone you want to learn from. The hardest step is sending; once you do, people are generally generous |
| Mentoring vs Adjacent Practices | Distinctions between mentoring, coaching, consulting, and counselling | Use when deciding which kind of support you need or are equipped to offer. Useful mid-conversation if the territory shifts |
| Current State / Gap / Future State (absorbed, no separate framework page) | A three-part model: where is the mentee now, where do they want to be, what is the gap | Useful as a mental anchor when you feel uncertain as a mentor. (Considered for promotion to a framework page but not promoted: the operational version of this model is the Career Mapping framework, which covers the same idea with more structure. The mental-anchor framing remains useful within the mentoring conversation cycle.) |
Last updated 2026-05-10.