Mentoring in its finest form recognizes the protégé as the focal point and the driving force in mentoring relationships.  It is the protégé’s dream and the protégé’s development of dreams that define the need for mentoring and the purpose of the relationship.

Planned mentoring programs that are institutionally-designed are often established for the purpose of accomplishing the institution’s goals rather than promoting the protégé’s objectives.  Furthermore, the existing political environment and power structures in organizations make it difficult for a protégé to appear as anything other than ‘needy’ thereby requiring special help.  Within this framework, mentors will often ‘go through the motions’ only because the boss ordered it.  However, enlightened planned mentoring can serve an important role in organizations if the mentoring is properly understood and implemented for very specific protégé-centered objectives.

Rather than most planned mentoring, we believe that spontaneous protégé-driven mentoring is most likely to be successful.  Therefore, UIF insists that the challenge for organizations is to align the organization’s objectives with those of its protégés and mentors.  UIF advocates introducing Open-System Mentoring programs that encourage natural mentoring which create and preserve mentoring-type organizational cultures.