Shining the light on the ‘darker side’ of mentoring, Lis Merrick explores how mentees can feel under pressure to ‘please’ or be compliant with their mentors

Working in mentor supervision with talent, graduate and diversity programmes in recent years, I have become conscious of some mentees being keen to either ‘please’ their mentors, or feeling obliged or even slightly coerced to comply with what the mentor wants them to do. This happens not just in sponsorship programmes, but also in programmes set up and run as developmental...