What Do You Call the Person You Are Mentoring?

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Mentee?
Protégé?
Mentored?
Mentoree?

What shall I call this person I am mentoring?

At Leadership Design Group, this is a frequent question. This even has been the subject of spirited internal debate.

Here is a summary of the debate as we see it and how Leadership Design Group has crafted our own communication:

“Mentee”

The choice of many mentors, this term came into use in 1965, according to Merriam-Webster dictionary. Its broad use, however, has been quite recent and came into wide use from its adaptation primarily in the business world.

Word purists have some difficulty with the word “mentee.” (And many spell-checkers have the same difficulty!) The word “mentor,” or course, comes from The Odyssey. Odysseus, the Greek legendary king of Ithaca, left his son Telemachus in the charge of his friend Mentor when he left for the Trojan wars.

But The Odyssey’s “Mentor” was a person, the name of Odysseus’ friend, a proper noun. In the intervening years the proper noun morphed into a verb as language will (have you every “FedExed a package? Xeroxed a copy?) and Mentor became, for all time, the quintessential wise, trusted advisor and counselor.

Where “mentee” violates word purists’ sensibilities is on this point: the verb is “to mentor” not “to ment”. We use “trainer” and “trainee” and the words flow easily off our tongue. They do, because they are built on the root of the verb, “train.” “Mentee” is not and, we must say, does not flow easily from our tongue.

Though we do not count ourselves among them, we agree with the word purists. We know we are swimming against a strong tide of usage.

“Protégé”

The “proper” term for one being mentored is a protégé. This is a lovely word. It has a very nice cadence and wonderful sound, as French words usually do.

However, at Leadership Design Group, we do not use it.

The Latin origin of the word has the sense of one protected—one under the protection of someone greater or stronger or wiser than him or herself. Modern usage has the sense of a student, charge, ward or apprentice to the master.

This is not how we view the relationship of a Whole-Life mentor to the one being mentored. While we like the term, it does not transmit a meaning we want to convey.

“Mentored”

We can dispense with this option rather quickly. It is not in wide use. It is in past tense. At Leadership Design Group we are actively in the present moving to a preferred future with those we mentor.

We could never use a past tense word to describe what we do.

Which leaves…

“Mentoree”

It works for us. It is the right construction of the verb form of our craft. We recognize we are swimming upstream on this, but we do so gladly.

So in these blogs and in our material, you’ll hear about mentorees. These are those that are experiencing Intentional, Deep-Change, Whole-Life, Transformational mentoring that seeks to have people—our mentorees—live into and out of all that they are designed to be.

What do you call the individuals you are mentoring?

We would be happy to hear from you; even to continue the debate!

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