Mentorship
Mentorship is the patronage, influence, guidance, or direction given by a mentor.[1] A mentor is someone who teaches or gives help and advice to a less experienced and often younger person.[2] In an organizational setting, a mentor influences the personal and professional growth of a mentee. Most traditional mentorships involve having senior employees mentor more junior employees, but mentors do not necessarily have to be more senior than the people they mentor. What matters is that mentors have experience that others can learn from.[3]
"Mentor" and "Protégé" redirect here. For other uses, see Mentor (disambiguation) and Protégé (disambiguation).
According to the Business Dictionary, a mentor is a senior or more experienced person who is assigned to function as an advisor, counsellor, or guide to a junior or trainee. The mentor is responsible for offering help and feedback to the person under their supervision. A mentor's role, according to this definition, is to use their experience to help a junior employee by supporting them in their work and career, providing comments on their work, and, most crucially, offering direction to mentees as they work through problems and circumstances at work.[4]
Interaction with an expert may also be necessary to gain proficiency with cultural tools.[5] Mentorship experience and relationship structure affect the "amount of psychosocial support, career guidance, role modeling and communication that occurs in the mentoring relationships in which the protégés and mentors engaged".[6]
The person receiving mentorship may be referred to as a protégé (male), a protégée (female), an apprentice, a learner or, in the 2000s, a mentee. Mentoring is a process that always involves communication and is relationship-based, but its precise definition is elusive,[7] with more than 50 definitions currently in use,[8] such as:
Mentoring in Europe has existed as early as Ancient Greek. The word's origin comes from Mentor, son of Alcimus in Homer's Odyssey.[10][11] Since the 1970s it has spread in the United States mainly in training contexts,[12] associated with important historical links to the movement advancing workplace equity for women and minorities[13] and has been described as "an innovation in American management".[14]
Professional bodies and qualifications[edit]
The European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC) is the leading global body in terms of creating and maintaining a range of industry-standard frameworks, rules and processes for mentorship and related supervision and coaching fields.[20][21][22]
As the focus of mentorship is to develop the whole person, the techniques used are broad and require wisdom to be appropriately used.[23] A 1995 study of mentoring techniques most commonly used in business found that the five most commonly used techniques among mentors were:[24]
Different techniques may be used by mentors according to the situation and the mindset of the mentee. The techniques used in modern organizations can be found in ancient education systems, from the Socratic technique of harvesting to the accompaniment used in the apprenticeship of itinerant cathedral builders during the Middle Ages.[24] Leadership authors Jim Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner advise mentors to look for "teachable moments" in order to "expand or realize the potentialities of the people in the organizations they lead" and underline that personal credibility is as essential to quality mentoring as skill.[25]
There are different types of mentors, such as:
A meta-analysis of 112 individual research studies found mentoring has significant behavioral, attitudinal, health-related, relational, motivational, and career benefits.[33] For a learner, these benefits depend on the different functions being performed by the mentor. Originally, the concept of mentoring functions developed from qualitative research in an organizational context with functions that belong under two major factors: psychosocial support (e.g. role modeling, friendship, emotional support, encouragement) and career-related support (e.g. providing advice, discussing goals).[34] An early quantitative approach found role modeling to be a distinct third factor.[35] In mentoring for college success, a fourth function concerning knowledge transfer was additionally identified,[36] which was also discovered in the context of mentoring creativity.[37]
There are also many benefits for an employer to develop a mentorship program for new and current employees:
Hetty van Emmerik did a similar study that looked at the effects of mentorship in the context of difficult working situations. Several major findings were made as a result of this research:[47]
1. Mentoring has been linked to improved job performance (i.e. intrinsic job satisfaction and career satisfaction).
2. Mentoring diminishes the negative association between unfavourable working circumstances and positive job outcomes, making the relationship stronger for those without a mentor than for those who have one.
3. Mentoring has been found to be negatively connected with all three characteristics of burnout (emotional weariness, depersonalization, and decreased personal accomplishment) employee outcomes.
Contemporary research and practice in the US[edit]
Partly in response to a study by Daniel Levinson,[48] research in the 1970s led some women and African Americans to question whether the classic "white male" model was available or customary for people who are newcomers in traditionally white male organizations. In 1978 Edgar Schein described multiple roles for successful mentors.[49] He identified seven types of mentoring roles in his book Career Dynamics: Matching individual and organizational needs (1978). He said that some of these roles require the teacher to be, for example, an "opener of doors, protector, sponsor and leader".
Capability frameworks encourage managers to mentor staff. Although a manager can mentor their own staff, they are more likely to mentor staff in other parts of their organisation, staff in special programs (such as graduate and leadership programs), staff in other organisations or members of professional associations.
Mentoring covers a range of roles. Articulating these roles is useful not only for understanding what role an employee plays, but also for writing job applications.
Two of Schein's students, Davis and Garrison, studied successful leaders who differed in ethnicity and gender. Their research presented evidence for the roles of: cheerleader, coach, confidant, counsellor, developer of talent, "griot" (oral historian for the organization or profession), guardian, guru, inspiration, master, "opener of doors", patron, role model, pioneer, "seminal source", "successful leader", and teacher.[50] They described multiple mentoring practices which have since been given the name of "mosaic mentoring" to distinguish this kind of mentoring from the single mentor approach.
Mosaic mentoring is based on the concept that almost everyone can perform one or another function well for someone else — and also can learn along one of these lines from someone else. The model is seen as useful for people who are "non-traditional" in a traditional setting, such as non-white people and women in a traditionally white male organization. The idea has been well received in medical education literature.[51]
Blended mentoring[edit]
Blended mentoring is the implementation of information technology (IT) into the traditional mentoring program, and is intended to give the opportunity to career counseling and development services to adopt mentoring in their standard practices.[62] Compared to a strict form of e-mentoring where communication between the mentor and learner is done electronically, and the traditional model of face-to-face mentoring, blended mentoring has been found to increase student satisfaction (which is inherently tied to effectiveness) by combining online group mentoring sessions with individual, face-to-face meetings with a mentor.[62] By incorporating IT with the traditional mentoring method, students can benefit from the technologies of e-mentoring while receiving direct and personal advice from the traditional method.
Business mentoring[edit]
Business mentoring differs from apprenticeship: a business mentor provides guidance to a business owner or an entrepreneur on the entrepreneur's business,[81] whereas an apprentice learns a trade by working on the job with the "employer".
A 2012 literature review by EPS-PEAKS investigated business mentoring, mainly focused on the Middle-East and North Africa region.[82] The review found strong evidence to suggest that business mentoring can have real benefits for entrepreneurs, but highlights some key factors that need to be considered when designing mentoring programmes, such as the need to balance formal and informal approaches and to appropriately match mentors and learners.
Cup Framework of Mentoring[edit]
The Cup Framework is a form of learning about a mentor's and mentee's relationship. There are two factors to consider in relation to the mentee in this framework: content and context. The inputs that a mentee is absorbing are referred to as content. This is information about their profession, life, and other things that they constantly absorb, process, and comprehend during the day. The capacity of the mentee to understand and absorb information is referred to as context.
The Cup Framework can be used to create an organisational culture that values and encourages employee growth, as well as allowing mentors to feel fulfilled in their roles without having to invest too much time and attention away from their own work.[47]