Mentorship
Mentorship is the patronage, influence, guidance, or direction given by a mentor. A mentor is someone who teaches or gives help and advice to a less experienced and often younger person. 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.
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.
Interaction with an expert may also be necessary to gain proficiency with cultural tools. 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".
The person receiving mentorship may be referred to as a protégé, a protégée, 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, with more than 50 definitions currently in use, such as:
Mentoring in Europe has existed as early as Ancient Greece. The word's origin comes from Mentor, son of Alcimus in Homer's Odyssey. Since the 1970s it has spread in the United States mainly in training contexts, associated with important historical links to the movement advancing workplace equity for women and minorities and has been described as "an innovation in American management".
History
The word was inspired by the character Mentor in Homer's Odyssey. Although the Mentor in the story is portrayed as a somewhat ineffective old man, the goddess Athena assumes his appearance to guide young Telemachus in his time of difficulty.Historically significant systems of mentorship include the guru–disciple tradition practiced in Hinduism and Buddhism, Elders, the discipleship system practiced by Rabbinical Judaism and the Christian church and apprenticeship under the medieval guild system.
In the United States, advocates for workplace equity in the second half of the twentieth century popularized the term "mentor" and the concept of career mentorship as part of a larger social capital lexicon that also includes terms such as glass ceiling, bamboo ceiling, networking, role model, and gatekeeper, which serves to identify and address the problems barring non-dominant groups from professional success. Mainstream business literature has adopted the terms and concepts and promoted them as pathways to success for all career climbers. These terms were not in the general American vocabulary until the mid-1990s.
Professional bodies and qualifications
The European Mentoring and Coaching Council 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.Techniques
As the focus of mentorship is to develop the whole person, the techniques used are broad and require wisdom to be appropriately used. A 1995 study of mentoring techniques most commonly used in business found that the five most commonly used techniques among mentors were:- Accompanying: the mentor participates in the learning process alongside the learner and supports them.
- Sowing: the mentor gives initially unclear or unacceptable advice to the learner that has value in a given situation.
- Catalyzing: the mentor chooses to plunge the learner right into change to provoke a different way of thinking, a change in identity or a re-ordering of values.
- Showing: the mentor teaches the learner by demonstrating a skill or activity.
- Harvesting: the mentor assesses and defines the utility and value of the learner's skills.
There are different types of mentors, such as:
- Multiple mentors: A new trend is for a learner to have multiple mentors. Having more than one mentor can expand the learner's knowledge, as different mentors may have different strengths.
- Profession or trade mentor: This is someone who is currently in the trade or profession the learner is entering. They know the trends, important changes, and new practices that newcomers should know to stay at the top of their careers. A mentor like this would be someone a learner can discuss ideas with and also provides the learner with the opportunity to network with other individuals in the trade or profession.
- Industry mentor: This is someone who does not only focus on the profession and can give insight into the industry as a whole, such as research, development, or key changes.
- Organization mentor: Politics in organizations are constantly changing. It is important to be knowledgeable about the values, strategies, and products that are within the organisation, and when they change. An organization mentor can give clarity when needed, for example, on missions and strategies.
- Work process mentor: This mentor can cut through unnecessary work, explain the "ins and outs" of projects and day-to-day tasks, and eliminate unnecessary things in the learner's workday. This mentor can help finish tasks quickly and efficiently.
- Technology mentor: Technology has been rapidly improving and becoming more a part of day-to-day transactions within companies. A technology mentor can help with technical breakdowns, advise on systems that may work better than what the learner is currently using, and coach them in using new technology.
Types of mentoring
Formal mentoring
Formal mentoring relationships are set up by an administrative unit or office in a company or organization, which solicits and recruits qualified individuals who are willing to mentor, provides training to the mentors, and helps to match the mentors with a person in need of mentoring. While formal mentoring systems contain numerous structural and guidance elements, they usually allow the mentor and mentee to have an active role in choosing who they want to work with. Formal mentoring programs that simply assign mentors to mentees without allowing input from these individuals have not performed well. Even though a mentor and a mentee may seem perfectly matched "on paper", in practice, they may have different working or learning styles. As such, giving the mentor and the mentee the opportunity to help select who they want to work with is a widely used approach. For example, youth mentoring programs assign at-risk children or youth who lack role models and sponsors to mentors who act as role models and sponsors.In business, formal mentoring is one of many talent management strategies that are used to groom key employees, newly hired graduates, high-potential employees, and future leaders. Matching mentors and mentees is often done by a mentoring coordinator with the help of a computerized database registry, which usually suggests matches based on the type of experience and qualifications being sought.
There are formal mentoring programs that are values-oriented, while social mentoring and other types focus specifically on career development. Some mentorship programs provide both social and vocational support. In well-designed formal mentoring programs, there are program goals, schedules, training, and evaluation.
Informal mentoring
Informal mentoring occurs without the use of structured recruitment, mentor training and matching services. It can develop naturally between partners, such as business networking situations where a more experienced individual meets a new employee and the two build a rapport. Apart from these types, mentoring takes a dyadic structure in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine.Informal mentoring of youth commonly takes the form of guidance from an adult who is engaged with the youth via a shared interest or common location, particularly in caring occupations, or another supportive non-relative adult in their lives.
The conservative political journal National Affairs cites research indicating that the quantity and quality of such mentors are more limited for low-income youth than for more-privileged youth. One meta-analysis of various research data, comparing the effects of informal mentors on 3,158 middle-class youth with the effects of informal mentors on 795 low-income youth, found that the middle-class youth benefitted from greater upward mobility than peers without informal mentors; but the same was not true for low-income youth. However, another study found that -- though young people with many resources were more likely than other youth to have informal mentors -- youth with few resources are more likely to benefit from having an informal mentor.
Research has indicated a decline in both formal and informal mentoring of youth in the United States, between 2013 and 2022, with informal mentoring declining by 13%. Some analysts believe one factor contributing to the decline was the COVID-19 pandemic, limiting young people's access to mentors for prolonged periods due to the closing of formal mentoring programs, as well as closing schools, after-school and athletic programs, community events and various other activities where the young could meet mentors. Gatherings of extended family were likewise curtailed. Experts add that the pandemic’s economic crisis, coupled with increasing socioeconomic inequality, may have added to the decline, because adults who are struggling financially may lack time or resources to mentor the young.