"Parents who identify with their child's success and live through it vicariously are the most potentially dangerous of mentors." Witness the tennis player Mary Pierce's overbearing father "The parent does not let the child become independent. When Joanna finally chose to ask a senior figure whom she had already got to know, she was taken aback when he refused "It was well known that he was a great womaniser. I didn't think this would matter, but he was worried that any future progress I might make within the company, particularly if I did well very quickly, would be attributed to this."The mentor who has not just their libido but self-gain, money or fame at heart, is also a bad mentor Pushy and often unfulfilled parents are frequent offenders. "The existence of mentoring meant that you could go out and have drinks with senior male colleagues without something being read into it. If somebody said, 'Oh, you get on very well with James,' for instance, you could explain it by replying, 'Well, actually he is my mentor'."Choice of mentor was open to misinterpretation, however. "It is intended that you grow and learn and experience the business, that you become an entrepreneur," says Whitehorn.Whitehorn, for example, joined the company as executive assistant to a senior PR executive Within a matter of years he was sitting on the board. "The idea is to make the company grow organically and to grow the skills of people.

We just need good people and you don't get them unless you take an interest in what they are doing."For Joanna Moore (not her real name), a former marketing trainee at Reuters, the benefits were two-fold, easing not only mobility within the company but sexual politics also. The mentoring scheme was very informal, however, and management trainees were expected to select their own mentor, which was not always successful."The organisation was male-led and quite traditional, such that it was open to suggestion that young female sales trainees had got on well because they had slept with somebody," recalls Joanna. Many companies - Marks & Spencer, Reuters, Virgin, for example - now recognise the value of one- to-one relationships in what are otherwise large, impersonal and competitive environments Schemes run on a formal and informal basis. "It is very much the way Virgin has developed over the years," explains Will Whitehorn, the company's corporate affairs director.