Activity: Visualizing Your Network

This activity by the National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity will provide a way to visualize or map your mentoring relationships. Visualizing your network is extremely important in order to reflect on needs for the future.

Purpose

By visualizing your network of mentoring relationships, and keeping your professional or personal goals in mind, you can identify which relationships will help you reach those goals. These could be the people in your network that you connect deeper with in a formal mentorship.

Time

20-30 minutes

Materials

Mentor Mapping sheet from the National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity (NCFDD), Writing Utensil

Who

We suggest completing the map individually and then having a conversation with a trusted friend or colleague to talk about the current state, future state and strategies to advance your mentoring relationships.

What

Fill in your network map with individuals who you can see as mentors in each category.
After mapping your mentoring relationships, ask yourself: How will you best use this information? Where do you want to be in a year? What are the strategies you might deploy to get there?

Tips

This is an exercise that can be done on an ongoing basis to reflect on progress and to make decisions about future engagements.

Variations

Additional questions to consider and reflect upon:

- Who do I admire? Who is an effective leader?

- Giving and receiving are equally important: how best to model as a mentor and mentee?

- What are strategies and behaviors to sustain and nurture your network?

- What parts of your network are enduring and what parts are time-limited?

- What are the relationships between the nodes of your network?

- What is the purpose of your network? What do you need right now? In a year?

Materials