Mentorship
[3] 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.
[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".
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.
[18] 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,[19] 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.
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 (STEMM).
Mentoring has been found to be negatively connected with all three characteristics of burnout (emotional weariness, depersonalization, and decreased personal accomplishment) employee outcomes.
[48] He identified seven types of mentoring roles in his book Career Dynamics: Matching individual and organizational needs (1978).
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.
These companies may provide some tools and resources and encourage managers to accept mentoring requests from more junior members of the organization.
[citation needed] The initiative encompasses nine formal mentoring programs, some enterprise-wide and some limited to specific business segments and functions.
Goals vary by program, with some focused on employees facing specific challenges or career milestones and others enabling more open-ended learning and development.
Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans claim that new employees who are paired with a mentor are twice as likely to remain in their job than those who do not receive mentorship.
Then cultivation occurs which includes the actual "coaching...a strong interpersonal bond between mentor and mentee develops".
[56] High-potential mentoring programs are used to groom up-and-coming employees deemed to have the potential to move up into leadership or executive roles.
Another method of high-potential mentoring is to place the employee in a series of jobs in disparate areas of an organization (e.g. human resources, sales, operations management, etc.)
for short periods of time, so they can learn in a hands-on, practical fashion, about the organization's structure, culture, and methods.
This learner-driven methodology increases the speed of matches being made and reduces the amount of administrative time required to manage the program.
[57] The quality of matches increases with self-match programs because mentorships tend to be more successful when the learner is involved in selecting their mentor.
Speed networking occurs as a one-time event in order for people "to meet potential mentors to see if there is a fit for a longer term engagement".
[61] Mentorship is crucial to high-quality education because it promotes individual development and growth while also ensuring the "passing on" of skills and professional standards to the next generation.
[63] A specific focus of youth mentoring that addresses the issues that cause students to underachieve in education while simultaneously preparing them to deal with difficult circumstances that can affect their lives in the future and alter their success is the fostering of resilience.
Resilience has been found to be a useful method when working with students from low socioeconomic backgrounds who often encounter crises or challenges and suffer specific traumas.
Protective factors "modify or transform responses to adverse events so that [students] avoid negative outcomes" and encourage the development of resilience.
[65] Their development enables students to apply them to challenges and engage in them positively that does not negatively affect their education, personal lives, or successes.
Examples of these protective factors identified by Reis, Colbert and Hebert in their three-year study of economically disadvantaged and ethnically diverse students include "supportive adults, friendships with other achieving students, the opportunity to take honors and advanced classes, participation in multiple extracurricular activities both after school and during the summer, the development of a strong belief in the self, and ways to cope with the negative aspects of their school, urban and family environment.
[71] A coach's main responsibility is to change a teacher's practice and build their knowledge on "new instructional materials, programs, and initiatives".
A 2012 literature review by EPS-PEAKS investigated business mentoring, mainly focused on the Middle-East and North Africa region.
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.
