Honor Poulton is Senior Associate at Trinity Group Limited. She joined Routes for our 12th Mentoring Programme, starting in April 2024 with training and mentoring. Honor supported her mentee with her next steps for university, including getting ready to start studying and exploring scholarship options.
Honor herself studied Human Sciences as an undergraduate degree - a combination of social and biological sciences. For this blog, she goes back to her student days, to think about mentoring through the biological metaphor of ‘symbiosis’. Building on reciprocity, interdependence and independence, the Routes Mentoring Programme is designed to support mutual learning and growth. Please find Honor’s observations below.
Biology featured heavily in my undergraduate degree of Human Sciences. One biological metaphor I've been considering when I applied for Routes and throughout the Routes programme is the process of symbiosis.
Broadly defined, symbiosis describes a close and often long-term interaction between two different organisms.
There are different types of symbiosis: negative, termed parasitism where one organism benefits at the expense of the other; neutral, commensalism when one organism benefits while the other is neither helped nor harmed, and crucially most common in the animal kingdom, mutualism, whereby both organisms benefit from the relationship.
Mentoring, in its purest form, is designed to allow for mutualism - two different people, mutually benefitting from a relationship though sometimes in varied ways. Just as in nature where symbiosis is vital to population and community dynamics in an ecosystem, so too is mentoring part of the mutualism required to build productive, positive, and long-lasting relationship dynamics. This is all the more important in our society, where all too often we do not make the time or space to support one another, challenge our perspectives and truly reflect and introspect on our goals and ambitions.
Reciprocity
Relationships require reciprocity. The Routes Programme builds on this foundation, supporting relationship-building from the start. Forging a connection between two women who from the outset are completely unknown to one another can be daunting for both mentor and mentee. But there are ways around that, by spending a lot of time getting to know each other in the first meetings.
One icebreaker I've always loved doing when meeting someone for the first time is a straightforward game I was once taught. You have 5 minutes to come up with as many things in common as you have with the other person. I did this exercise with my mentee during our first meeting and we soon found we shared significant and insignificant similarities. From icebreakers and conversations, a relationship was formed, and the foundation of reciprocity established.
Over the course of the mentoring sessions, different objectives evolve: we explored the goals my mentee wanted to work on, and what we can do in the mentoring sessions to support her with that. Doing so from a point of view of reciprocity supports the mentee's acquisition of knowledge, skills, and guidance in a way that feels grounded in the shared space that we were creating. This is mutualism, as it benefits the mentor, too. As a mentor, one of the most valuable takeaways is often the new perspective and ideas that a mentoring relationship can bring. Encouraging self-reflection in your mentee, organically encourages internal introspection. For me, this has certainly also challenged the way I listen and speak to myself.
Being part of the wider Routes mentoring cohort, surrounded by other women with different expertise, careers and passions also provided me with the opportunity to listen and learn from their experiences. Here too, reciprocity was an important part of the mentoring training sessions
For example, we did one activity where we shared where we feel we are on our leadership journey and where we would like to be, and discussed with one another the tools and learnings that each of us could develop in order to grow and develop as a leader. The Routes community encourages both mentors and mentees to lean on one, and build reciprocal relationships across the Routes network, throughout the mentoring journey.
Interdependence and independence
We are all closely connected as human beings, but we might not always live our lives as such. Living and working in London often forces you to become highly independent, and I am certainly guilty of having become a less friendly and more outwardly hostile since living here. Stepping into the training and mentoring at Routes has nudged me into a different practice of being and skills building: mutualism.
The mentor-mentee relationship often involves interdependence - you have to work together to achieve the goals you have defined. Conversely, it also necessitates independence, as a programme like Routes’ encourages you to build personal confidence and resilience. Relying on others is necessary to learn, but you must also be able to rely on and trust yourself and your abilities.
Long-term interactions
Mutualism requires long-term positive impact of some sort. Though the mentor-mentee relationship on the Routes Mentoring Programme does not necessarily continue past the 10 hours frame, the process is designed to inform and offer perspective and power to professional and personal interactions for both the mentor and mentee. In this sense, what could be considered a short/medium term programme provides a significant and sustained impact on both participants in a pair moving forwards.
Mentoring is not a one-way process. Instead, building upon the foundation of trust and respect, both mentee and mentor gain insight and learn and benefit in ways they may or may not have anticipated.
Two different people are drawn together to help one another - and this is exactly what we need more of, as in order to create and sustain communities, we first need to start with building mutualism into our interactions with one another.
Are you interested in joining to mentor with Routes? Read more about this immersive leadership programme here.
