The Mentor's Guide

Five Steps to Build a Successful Mentor Program

Laura Gail Lunsford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000485905
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Mentoring & Coaching
• Index: Business

A definitive resource that pulls together evidence from psychology, education, and organizational studies, this fully updated second edition translates research into practice and serves as a practical handbook on how to set up, run, and evaluate any mentoring program.

Despite ever-growing interest, there are few helpful resources for program managers and mentoring coordinators. This book sheds needed light on mentoring behaviors, the stages of mentoring, elements of high-quality relationships, and how to recognize and avoid dysfunctional ones. Step-by-step guidance will enable readers to:

• Understand what mentoring is (and is not)
• Assess their mentoring program using a clear framework
• Work through steps to design or redesign an effective mentoring program
• Draw on real-world examples to assess and improve programs
• Benefit from all-new material for this second edition, including a chapter on e-mentoring and in-depth case studies, as well as updated information on culturally intelligent mentoring and more

If you manage or support a mentoring program, then this handbook is for you. Human resource professionals across industries will gain ideas on how to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of mentoring, while administrators in higher education will value the content on formal mentorship programs for faculty members, graduate students, and undergraduates.

Chapter 1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003163862-1

It is difficult to understand the universe if you only study one planet. (Miyamoto Musashi, in Kaufman 2003, 12)

Mentoring has taken up a considerable portion of my professional life. Early in my career I was the alumni director at a top-ranked business school in the United States, Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. At Fuqua, I witnessed the positive outcomes of building effective networks of relationships. Later, at North Carolina State University, I spent more than a decade awarding millions of dollars from the generous trustees of the Park Foundation to talented undergraduates through the Park Scholarships. I developed a faculty–student mentoring program for these Park Scholars. Along the way, I have participated in mentoring relationships as both a protégé and a mentor. Most of the time, mentoring went well for me and for those in the formal mentoring programs that I oversaw. However, there were times when I questioned the effectiveness of these relationships. At other times I wondered if I or the participants were getting all that we could out of a relationship.

A friendly critic

As a scholar I developed a more critical view of mentoring, and as a practitioner I developed the skills to seek answers to my questions. Why did mentoring work so well for some people, and so poorly for others? Is a one-on-one relationship the only type of mentoring relationship? Does mentoring work the same way for people in different work settings or disciplines? I studied different types of helping relationships, how they develop, and what outcomes might be expected. In essence, I followed Musashi’s advice in the epigraph to this chapter and studied other planets in the mentoring universe.

It is easy to be seduced by the popular literature on mentoring. Who doesn’t want to be an “intelligent mentor” (Murrell et al. 2008) or a “divine mentor” (Cordeiro 2008)? An internet search will provide lists of the traits of great mentors and protégés. According to various websites, mentors are knowledgeable, effective communicators who possess integrity, emotional intelligence, honesty, diplomacy, and compassion. They are personally and professionally successful, as well as accessible, available, confident, inquisitive, patient, objective, sensitive, supportive, and fair. I have never met anyone who possesses all of these qualities. (If you know someone who does have all these traits, please send me their name and contact information!) In fact, I continue to be surprised when I see program managers provide such lists as examples to mentoring participants.

This book will draw on the scholarly literature on mentoring. In it, I present a more nuanced view about mentoring and what it can do. Congratulations if you are already a mentoring skeptic; if not, I ask that you join me and adopt a skeptical view about mentoring in your practice. Such a view may help you to support others as they develop their mentoring relationships and to both improve mentoring and recognize its limitations. Mentoring is not for everyone, and some people do not benefit from mentoring experiences. Further, even great mentors and protégés have bad days. This book is written for practitioners of mentoring who are willing to accept mentoring as a flawed relationship engaged in by humans who have strengths and weaknesses, and as a sometimes neutral (or even negative) experience.

Of course, mentoring can provide a powerful and formative experience that transforms protégés, mentors, and organizations for the better. If I did not believe this, then I would not be writing this book. Consider me a friendly critic of mentoring who may be exactly the right person to write such a guide. You can read on with confidence that I have scrutinized modern research with a critical eye to distill what might be most useful and helpful for program managers.

Why focus on program managers?

Note I use the term “program manager” to refer to anyone with responsibility for a formal mentoring initiative. Your title might be “mentoring program director,” “mentoring program coordinator,” or “learning specialist.” I selected one title for ease of writing and reading.

Over a decade ago I conducted my first workshop on mentoring titled “Creating Effective Mentoring Programs.” It was scheduled as a four-hour, pre-conference activity for the Mentoring Institute held at the University of New Mexico. I found the organizers to be optimistic in their anticipation of 40 attendees. But soon we were adding chairs. I have conducted many workshops from program design to mentor effectiveness and have met hundreds of people who genuinely wish to help others through formal mentoring programs. Yet program managers were often unsure how to recruit, match, or orient participants, much less decide on the right mentoring program activities.

The idea for this book emerged in 2011 when I was recruited to design a mentoring network for math and science teachers in rural Arizona. There was sufficient material on how to be a good mentor or protégé but limited information for program managers on how to start or support a formal mentoring program. Most information on teacher mentoring in the United States can be traced back to the New Teacher Center, which was created as a nonprofit organization by faculty from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Yet their emphasis was on training mentors, rather than on supporting mentoring program managers. Later, I identified one handbook for mentoring program managers, written about workplace mentoring programs (Allen et al. 2009).

Mentoring program managers deserve to be informed practitioners. Experience is important, but it can lead us astray. I have encountered naysayers and well-intentioned but misinformed individuals who say things like: “Sure we can do a mentoring program – after all, it is not like it is going to hurt anyone,” or “What’s the big deal about mentoring? If the relationship is no good, why don’t people just walk away?”

In other words, there is plenty of folk knowledge about mentoring that is downright wrong. This book draws on research to provide information about the bright and dark sides of mentoring; how to help mentors be “augmentors” and not “tormentors”; and how to think philosophically about the purpose of your mentoring program. (A list of mentoring resources is provided under “Resources” at the end of this chapter.)

Formal versus informal

This book focuses on formal mentoring relationships, although informal mentoring relationships also develop with some frequency and sometimes because of formal mentoring experiences (for example, see Case Study 11.1). There are two distinctions between formal and informal mentoring. First, formal mentoring implies providing assistance in connecting a mentor and a protégé. Second, formal mentoring programs are developed to achieve an organizational goal such as increasing diversity, retention, or developing future leaders. Formal mentoring programs are useful when it might be otherwise difficult for a protégé to connect with a mentor.

Terminology: “Protégé” versus “mentee”

The term “protégé” is used in this book to refer to the individual receiving mentoring. However, the term “mentee” may be substituted for protégé. Scholars in the United States often use the term “protégé,” while scholars in other countries prefer the word “mentee.” Some individuals object to the term “protégé” because it implies sponsorship or protection, which they feel is not appropriate in a mentoring relationship. One consistent term makes it easier to read, but there is no definitive reason why “protégé” is better than “mentee” – they are interchangeable terms here.

Purpose

The book has three aims:

1. create a single resource for program managers to reference;
2. advance the professionalization of the practice of mentoring by assembling evidence-based resources; and
3. make modern research on mentoring accessible to practitioners.

Mentoring has been around a long time, but attention to formal mentoring programs is relatively recent. At least in the United States, many formal mentoring programs grew out of lawsuits in the 1980s, where women and minorities did not have equal access to promotion and development opportunities. In Europe, mentoring is viewed more as a developmental relationship, rather than one focused on sponsorship (as in the United States). Perhaps this different emphasis has contributed to a greater effort in Europe to provide university coursework and certificates for mentoring program managers than is available in the United States or other countries.

The professionalization of mentoring and training for program managers is a relatively new idea, as is scholarship on mentoring. Universities and professional organizations in Australia and Europe now offer certification and training in mentoring. The United States has made a nascent effort in this regard, but colleges and universities have yet to offer much in the way of training, coursework, or professional development. See Table 1.1 for links to professional associations and related resources.

It is expensive to access journal articles unless you have an academic appointment, and, unfortunately, scholarly research often is written in a stilted academic style, using specialized language that may be difficult to interpret without advanced coursework in statistics. This book attempts to close the gap by translating research-to-practice in an easy-to-read format that hopefully will become well worn.

Who should read this book?

You may find this book to be helpful if you have responsibility for mentoring programs, activities, or initiatives. It is written for you if you are thinking about starting a mentoring program or if you are running an existing program. Further, the book may be useful to practitioners as well as graduate or advanced undergraduate students who desire to know more about mentoring. Your personal practice of mentoring as a mentor or protégé may ...